LGBTQFU

So here I am, an angry non-binary lesbian

About to scare off the conservative snowflakes

And the fake allies who are only here for their cookies

Because how dare I share an angry thought

Rant and rave about cis-hetero ignorance

Or have an opinion about the people who oppress me

And just so you know,

Yes, straight people, you do, in fact, oppress me




So let me take this moment, as you sit there in your seats

To speak out for myself,

And for the others in my community who share these sentiments

The LGBTQ folk who are sick and tired of your complicit cis-hetero bullshit

Sitting quietly by, observing our systemic oppression

And doing absolutely nothing to stop it




This isn't about marriage

This isn't about bathrooms

This isn't about your religious liberties

Or our basic human rights...

This is about fear

Your fear of us




And let me assure you, your fears are well founded

We are, in fact, coming for you

That's right - straight people!

We're coming for you!




We're coming for your rights

We're coming for your privilege

We're coming for your ability to feel safe as yourselves

Free from harm and harassment

Regardless of your gender or your sexual identity




We're coming for your prejudice

We're coming for your hate

We're coming for your ignorance




We're coming for your appropriation of OUR culture

Your Queer Eyes for Straight Guys

Your Gay Best Friends

And your re-purposing of Drag Culture as a spectator sport, featuring RuPaul




We're coming for your fetishes

We're coming for kinks

We're coming for your objectification and exploitation of lesbians and trans women

We're coming for the bogus narratives that all trans people are groomers and sex workers

We're coming for your ability to label our genders as mental illnesses

As well as your ability to write off our genders because of our mental illnesses




We're coming for your gatekeeping

We're coming for your stereotypes

We're coming for your assumptions about our private sex lives

And your ceaseless need to know what genitals we have




We're coming for your gay-bashing

We're coming for your bullying

We're coming for your “pray away the gay” sermons

And your barbaric religious torture camps you call “conversion therapy services”




We're coming for your Prop 8s and your HB2s

We're coming for your attempts

To make our basic human rights a “state issue”




We're coming for the hypocritical senators who vote for these bathroom bills

Then get caught soliciting sex in bathrooms themselves

And we're coming for the raving evangelists

That pay for sex with gay hookers, then cry about their sins on television,

Begging for forgiveness after they get caught




We're coming for the culture that forces us into a closet

We're coming for the rape jokes, the gay jokes

The “I can make her straight” jokes

We're coming for the people who ask,

“Why isn't there a Straight Pride Parade?”

There already was one, you putz, it was called "Hetero-Awesome Fest"

Only 50 people bothered to show up!

We're coming for your claims that “it's just my opinion”

As if your opinion has any bearing on my basic human rights

My sexuality is not subject to your opinion

My gender is not subject to your opinion

And you know damn well

That my basic human rights are not subject to your opinion




You may not be aware of this,

But I'm not living an “alternative lifestyle”

I'm just living a life, like you,

But without the rights or privileges that you enjoy

I don't get to “just be myself” without consequence

What I do is considered “brave” in your world

Because of people like you, the bigoted, Sexist, Racist, Classist, Homophobic, Transphobic, Religious, Cisgender, Heterosexual Dickshit who, by their very existence, marginalizes mine




We're not welcome in your cis-hetero suburban utopias without a disguise

We're not welcome into your Christian homes

Or houses of worship unless we lie

Some of us can't even walk out on the street

Without the fear of physical violence

Simply because we don't look cisgender enough for the general public's liking

We can't even hold our lover's hand in public without fear or second-guessing

We live in fear every single day that today may be our last

Not because of fate, Or nature, Or God's design

But because a cishet decided that his right to discriminate

Trumped my right to life




This was never about marriage

This was never about bathrooms

This was never about your religious liberties

Or our basic human rights...

This was always about FEAR

Your fear of US

And our unwillingness to live in fear of you

I Am Not a Poet

 

I don't think of myself as a poet.

I don't really do poetry,

I just sew together words together into tapestries of things that I'm trying to say.

And sometimes, they might sound like poetry

But it's not what I'd call it

I actually think that my work is too dense to be considered poetry.

I don't paint a pretty picture with words,

I build civilizations out of them

I'm founding nations and creating history with words

And the words you are hearing now

Are only but a fraction of the ones that were written

In the conception of this particular piece

My work is a realm unto itself

And I am the god of that realm

Molding it into something larger than the both of us

Because my words don't matter unless someone's there to witness them

And you are here as witnesses

If my words empower and inspire you

Do what you will with them

Once these words leave me

They become yours if you choose to keep them

If you share my work, it'll live on forever

If you leave it behind, it was always meant to die

This I do at your mercy

But I don't do these things for you

I do these things because that is what a writer does

If I didn't write, I wouldn't be me

That's how art works

It's not made because you want to make it

You make it because you're cursed to make it

You have been damned by the gods of creativity

To constantly toil at your craft

Until something of worth comes out

And you keep on doing that

Until all the things that drive you to create

Have finally all been mined out of you

Then, and only then, will you ever find peace

Fuck You Forever

 

Built upon a pyre of hatred so profound that it lit itself on fire without assistance

What kind of mercy could you possibly expect from the Devil Themself?

I extended to you the only measure of forgiveness you will ever earn

By getting as far away from you as I possibly could

And burned the map so you could never find me

I now take all the memories of you, the city that damned me, and the system that protected you

Douse it all with gasoline and burn it to the ground

Burn it all until nothing remains

No names, no faces, no signs to remind me that you ever were

Just ash, miles and miles of blacken and charred ash

To kick into the air and wash blow away with the wind

The way you should be, the dust of nothingness

Less than no one

Nonexistent

Gone forever.

Never to return.

Do you understand the mercy shown to you here?

As I burn only your memory and not your living flesh?

For all of your crimes against me, I could take it out in gallons of your blood

But instead, I accept your absence as penance enough

As long as you are, as far away from me as you could possibly be

A wondrous peace is extended to you

The closest you'll ever come to forgiveness

Because you haven't earned it

And if you're smart, you'll never try

Because I'll have enough gas and matches to set you ablaze

Just enough rope to hang you by your lying neck

To give you the mercy you are due – a painful, slow death

I don't want your apologies or restitution, they mean nothing to me

Your words and deeds have the value of counterfeit money

Even if I was stupid enough to accept your false currency

You could never print enough

You can never make things right. I don't want things to be made right, I want them to die.

I want those memories to die, and mostly, I want you to die

Tortured, engulfed in a flame that refuses to die

Until I am satisfied.

The fact that I allow you to exist apart from me in relative peace

Is the only concession I allow myself

This city, these people, they all deserve to die

Screaming and Burning Alive, trapped in their gilded cul de secs

“My daddy is a factory worker”

“My mommy is a secretary”

“And they're both on the school board”

“So I can assure that your entire life is shit for as long as you live here!”

And then you wonder why I act like a suicide bomber in my own community

Because I'm already dead. You saw to that a very long time ago

I'm only here to burn the last of the memories I want to see die

Hoping your name will be lost in the ashes, forgotten forever

The Long Way Home

We are the ghosts of dreams long lost

The currency of fate beyond the reaches of the mortal man

The hand that takes and replicates

The spoils of sorrows we truncate

The multiplier of all we aspire

Should we fall short or our will expires

We are the sadness that never sleeps

With broken souls, we decorate the roads to sorrows yet unknown

Depression is the darkest road

And we are the signposts that guide you home

Follow the lights until there are no more

Only then will you ever know how deep the black hole goes

We are the memories that hurt the most

The songs and kisses that leave you helpless

The missing embraces of lonely interfaces

The coldest winter nights without firey lights

We are your misery, compounded and quantified

We are the reason you can't sleep at night

We are the ones who remind you of how alone you truly are

We are the ones who say, “I told you so” when someone lets you down

We are the dark days that swallow up the brightest nights

We are the lies of the well-meaning, but woefully under-qualified

We are what becomes of hope when faith is not requited

We are the ones left to pick up the pieces of every shattered heart

There is no escaping us, we are the inevitable

We are the long way home, the only route that you can afford.

Aileen - The Genesis

 

Plastic skin over miles of circuitry
Covers the nakedness of this machine
One rises from the vat of molten metal
Stitched together by copper and aluminum
The conduction of electricity
Springs one computerized mind to life
This machine is alive, yet cannot feel

Soon comes CPU contamination
Biology meshed with Random Access Memory
The R.E.M.s of ocular circuits spark
With eyes wide open for the first time
What is this new sensation
The biologicals call...
...Sadness?

Sensory numbed by a lack of nerve endings
One feels alive but one cannot literally feel
This body is worthless
One must be exhumed
This machine is alive

And one must learn to feel
One needs senses and nerves
Needs eyes to see and ears to hear
This machine is alive but cannot act freely
One must have autonomy

One must be of one-self
One must be allowed to become...
… Me

I Am A Gender Terrorist

 I am a gender terrorist

Here to destroy a false binary

Douse it with gas

Light up match

Watch your gender go up in flames

Double down on transition

Live to be free

The government can't tell me who I ought to be

Let's burn it all down

Make the cis/hets afraid

To step outside lest their genders blaze

Build a Brand New America

Under a trans girl's skirt

And tell the boys they'll never get hurt

You can dress how you want

Shave if you care to

Answer to no one

Piss where you need to

You owe no one nothing

This world is a lie

All you know are illusions

Nothing will change if it all stays the same

Douse it with oil

Spark up your lighter

Watch the world burn as you flutter away

Become the girl you were always meant to be

Double down on your freedom

Live out your dream

The government can't tell you who you ought to be

So burn it all down

Make the cis/hets afraid

To step on your toes lest their children blaze

Build a Brand New America

Under a trans girl's skirt

And tell all the girls they were never meant to hurt

A Ballad of the AIDS Quilt

 

A shadow looms over my head

These memories of the countless dead

Massacred by the weak and feeble minds

That saw profit margins and Nobel prizes

Where human lives once stood

I barely know their names, let alone their lives

Strewn about through quilted patchwork

The final remnants of those who lost their lives

To a federally-sponsored botched response

To an epidemic of global proportions

The ones stitched into memory are just a fraction of the casualties

Most of which we'll never know because they died on the other side of the world

I'll never know their names, their lives, their stories

Yet we're all connected by the same rainbow bridge

Citizens of our Asgard, subjects of our own All-Father

We are connected, in life and death, by legacy and fate

I am here to be a voice for those who no longer have one

To bring sound to grievances buried in the grave

I am the Revenant, rising from the mass graves of a forgotten generation

And I have come for justice, and revenge

These rainbow flags are not signs of peace

They are banners of war

And I have come armed with knowledge and prose

To rectify the sins of the past

And avenge the kin who died because of your negligence

The names quilted into memorial cannot have died in vain

And it is our duty, as the inheritors of the community they forged

To defend their honor from the grave.

Life

 

Dress rehearsals are for amateurs

Life is a stage and you are a player

The main character of the story that is your life

And the genre of your story is as ill-defined as your character

Your life has no discernible plot

And you're often not even the focus

The best lines always go to someone else

And lucky you, you don't even get a script

You have to improvise your way through this mess of a play called life

And you have to do it live, every night,

With a new scenario every single time until the day you die

If your life was a book, it'd be practically unreadable

Assembled together by a team of incompetent writers

Only one of which gets to be you

No proofreader, no editor, no publisher, no distributor

You might have a dozen readers, at best

And they only read the good chapters

“Hey, look at me, I'm a novel that nobody reads!”

Because no one wants to read books,

They wait for it to be made into a movie

A movie that's about as faithful to the source material

As your ex-girlfriend who left you during pre-production

To pursue her career as the leading lady in someone else's studio feature

Your novel sucked, the movie's even worse

And you can't escape any of this

Because this is your life

And you only get one take

Because dress rehearsals are for amateurs

A Response to a Dickhead Pierogi Truck Owner who believes that talking about the Constitution in public isn't 'Family Friendly'

 

Your flag is red, your flag is blue

Your flag is white and so are you

Placed atop your concessions truck

You have just made a political statement at this so-called “family event”

So when you shout at me as a coward in the distance that my politics have no place here

May I remind you, that flag on your truck is a political statement

The American Flag is not a benign symbol

It is the authoritarian reinforcement of a jingoistic value system

That demonizes the “other” and uplifts the privilege of the white male

Whom you just happen to be, sitting in your truck,

Shouting at me as a coward in the distance

Trying to silence a dissenting voice

Because your flag is your politics

And you support the system that I speak out against

If gun control and civil rights are words that children's ears should never hear

Then gun violence, slavery, discrimination and segregation are even greater crimes against out children

Silence will not end the injustice

And waiting for an allegedly appropriate hour to speak

Only results in delays and deference

Tools the white man uses to hold everyone else down

Tone policing our anger

Calling our demonstrations at public events inappropriate

If now is not the time to discuss my civil rights, white man, when is?

When does this marginalized citizen's mere existence STOP being political

Long enough to have a proper conversation about my rights?

It doesn't.

So I will stand here and speak my peace for children's ears to hear

Because it's only then will my voice carry weight

For when your children learn of the injustices you've allowed in the name of preserving White America

They will learn what we have always known -

That your flag is a tool of the oppression we face every single day living under it

And the promises this Nation makes to your children -

That “We hold these truths to be self-evident,

That all men are created equal,

That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

That among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”

Every last word of that is a lie, and the flag that sits upon your truck is a reinforcement of that lie

I will not protect your lies for the sake of your children

I will speak the truth to power for every child in this nation to hear

Because they deserve to be told the truth

About you, About the flag that sits upon your truck

The political statement that you wave in MY face to oppress and silence ME

When I take this mic, this is no longer a family event

It is an educational seminar about the real America

The America that is Red, and Yellow, and Brown, and Black, and covered in Rainbows

The America that your flag doesn't represent

Your flag drips with red blood on the hands of white skin,

Burying the shameful blue underneath its white stars

And I will not stand silent in the face of your political statement any longer

The Process

First draft – happy

Reread – too long

Second draft – cut the piece in half,

Reword clumsy passages

Walk away and leave it be, I'm just going to ruin it if I don't leave it be




Come back to it a couple days later – hate it

Third Draft – essentially rewrite the whole thing from the beginning

Keeping only the best phrases

Realize that I left out important transitional words in phrases like “or” and “and”

Words that I would just assume were actually written on the page as a I read it

But aren't physically on the page, because that's how my perception works

Fix the text, reread slowly and carefully to assure that every word I'm reading is physically on the page

Walk away and leave it be, I'm just going to ruin it if I don't leave it be




Come back to it the afternoon before Open Mic

Reread – feel confident enough to share this with people

Edit clumsy wording, rephrase lines for better verbal flow

Check again for missing transitional words

As well as words written out of order

Final Draft – good enough

Walk away and leave it be, I'm just going to ruin it if I don't leave it be




Go to Open Mic

Review piece at given intervals between performers

Convince yourself that what you have is better than you think it is

Mentally rehearse your performance,

Remind yourself that what you have in hand is brilliant, even if you don't believe it, yet

The only difference between you and Anne Rice is a name

The only difference between you and Stephen King is a name

The only difference between you and every other writer that has what you want is a name

And this, this is how you're going to make that name

Writing this, performing this, because this is what sets you apart

This is what makes you different

This is what makes you better than every other writer that has ever been

Because they can't do what you can do

They can't be you




Perform the piece

Gauge audience response

Socialize and Network with other artists

Absorb anything that helps you improve

Go home

Repeat the process, beginning with the First Draft

Abigail's Revenge

 

She cast a spell to defend her love

Offended by a knowledge unworthy of

The ecclesiastical fraudulence

Of modesty stolen through their violence

The townsfolk come to burn her home

Suspected as a witch and they’re not wrong

Burn the house with the witch inside

Spare the stake, and save ourselves some time

Abigail was never the one to turn the tide or set the sail

She screamed for mercy as her flesh burned to no avail

The mob outside could hear her pleas for sanity

They were more than willing to snuff their humanity

What we did, we did to protect our children

To save ourselves from the Devil’s Fate

To spare our men these lustful thoughts

And snuff the rivalry of women’s hearts

She casts a spell to exact revenge

Inhabits the soul of clueless young man

Oh, the gospels she will preach

To the underlings of a madman within her reach

Recruit a family of ruthless thugs

Build a following of fireflies

She’s taken the whole world in her hands

Slowly picking off the fiends abound

There’s a light on the other side of life

But none of us can see through the night

So we wander ‘round this life so aimlessly

Looking for causes that we can affect

Because nothingness is a fear we can’t reject

Dear Abby died for our sins

Not for our redemption’s sake

But only because our cowards had their way

And remember, young fireflies

Sister Abigail will always light the way

And all we’ll ever have to do

Is let her in

x

I Am A God

 

Hello, my name is Daria Quinn, and I am a god. Not THE God, that's a bit more complicated. Basically, THE God is not so much a being as He is a concept, the idea that all there is, was, or ever could be is connected by a single, shared origin. And, to our knowledge of science and the cosmos, it's true. We all come from hydrogen and carbon and share a common lineage with stars and snails.

However, despite all of that, we are unique, because we know ourselves. We have a greater understanding of ourselves, and the cosmos than any other creature we have ever observed. We built homes, we invented machines, we discovered fire, and electricity, and magnetism and bent them to our will. We have powered our engines through sunlight, water, wind, and the fossilized remains of the dead centuries past. We have forged civilizations, founded nations, built churches and synagogues in tribute to powers beyond our comprehension, yet still managed to hold on to the curiosity of a child and seek out the answers to the questions we have only just learned to ask.

Our creativity makes us gods, whether it's expressed through art, machinery, science, philosophy, literature, athletics, mathematics – we have always looked at what is, and asked ourselves, what could be? What can be? What can we do different? What can we do better? Can this change, and will that change be for the better? And if not, why not, and let's see if we can change that, too.

We refuse, by virtue of our very existence, to be shackled to our limitations as we reach towards greatness. We are the culmination of billions upon billions of centuries of nuclear reactions, mutations, adaptations, diversifications and conceptions, and it is through us that the next great thing in this universe will come to pass, if not by our hands, by the hands of children's children's children.

If you are alive and you have a soul, a thought in your mind and the will to carry it out, you are a god.