i covered my canvas with seventeen layers of white paint, one for each time i lost my purity like a picture of Dorian Gray, in reverse, a testament to my slow corruption into adulthood some dreams are shattered all at once, some are left intact, but mine were stripped from me, like seventeen layers of…
Category: Creative
perception
Today instead of “male-presenting” I referred to “male-perceived”. It was a moment of exhaustion and missing the intended word, or so I thought until I reflected later and realized that this is why I’m not fond of “male-presenting”. Because I don’t “present” as a man. I don’t wake up in the morning and make choices…
like an old pair of jeans
i slip depression on like an old pair of jeans softened and pliable with the familiarity of time this tear on the knee is where i scraped it when i fell down on the concrete that was harder than it looked that patch covers the place where the fabric was worn through by time and…
Leviathan
leviathan is a tapeworm inside my skull devouring the me that it finds it rises, roils, recoils, and leaves me hollow and alone as i stand against it, it warns me: boy, don’t make me destroy you and i ask: what if i’ve never been a boy? what would you have to destroy? — ptkh…
Dream: The other half of the house
Here is a dream. I had noticed that we were missing one of the steps going to the basement, but we’d learned to just hop over the gap. I finally decided to fix the stair. I hopped down into the gap, picking up the step that had fallen down underneath the stairway. I looked at…
when i was a boy
when i was a boy, i was a fragile boy who shattered in the slightest breeze my storms came quickly and violently and even on the sunniest days, the clouds still hung low when i was a man, i was an angry man who screamed and flailed in private in public, i wore a mask,…
The Day is Not as Hopeless as it Seems
As in the fading of my childish dreams, When trees bore fruit of sorrows grim, The day is not as hopeless as it seems. All that yearning filling sloppy reams, But paper yellows and ink will slowly dim As in the fading of my childish dreams. The child is grown, the light that gleams Once…
broken men crawled down the wires
broken men crawled down the wires that weave that were woven labyrinthine overhead bloated shadows of yesterday’s dream dissolving until there are only wisps of what was i had taken it all for granted and now the canopy of wires and wasn’t-wasses blocked out the miserly sun time to pause, to tear down, to rebuild,…
do you think that my father
do you think that my father ever wanted to wear a frilly summer dress and pirouette through the fields with the birds and the butterflies? he was a big man towering at six and a third feet and greeted as the buddha incarnate by children in china but maybe inside of him was a fragile…
A Mathematician’s Sonnet
So algebra is not aligned to taste: A bunch of letters dancing without need. You find the dancers nothing but a waste? My friend, some words on this you ought to heed: We start with adding, just as shepherds did To count their flocks when sent to fields by day. Subtraction’s just some adding being…