Here is a sampling of some of my published and unpublished poems. All rights reserved.
Manifesto
If you put pen
To bright white paper
And challenge the emptiness
To games of touch football
And always try to get back up when the truth gets too rough
And always remember to never let other people
Get in the way of a good story
And never let a good story
Get in the way of believing in others
I will call you author
If you scribble on napkins
Sober reflections of nights past overdrawn
Like you ran out of credit for healthy living
And are just trying to make a budget
With two bucks and a cup of coffee
Or if you find yourself recounting the lessons of one too many
To your journal
In the dark corner
Of a party
Meant for forgetting
I will call you writer
If you string “topography” to “skin” to “museum” to “accidents”
And drag them behind you
Running
Like they are a kite you can’t give up on
Like they are searchlights others will use to find their way
I will call you poet
If you have trouble looking yourself in the eyes
And walks by yourself contain 500 voices
And every window you pass is a reflection of what you use to call yourself
But if you try to make each word a love scrawled brink
And you try to make each moment a declaration
That mirrors are beautiful
When we stand in front of them
I will call you artist
If you remember with each breathe
And cast every blink a new scene
In a life-long documentary about love
And each snort is a declaration that we don’t need things to get easier
And your smile holds the stories of those that came before you
I will call you queer
And if you do none of these things
But breathe through each day
And try to see yourself as mighty
And try to use that strength for that which you believe serves others
I will call you creator
And I will be grateful
For all that will come to be
Through all that you are right now
Seattle, 2012
Gender-will
Gender is Walt Disney’s local Salvation Army. There are plenty of glass slippers to not fit into but if you try, you can construct yourself with parts from Hercules, Tinker Bell, and the Magic Carpet
Gender is an invisible-fence collar you slowly learn you are wearing. Not all the boundaries have signs but you’ll notice when you’ve crossed one, the shocks are un-ignorable. On occasion the fence is a line of rakes with the points all sticking up that you just can’t help but step on
The first time I stepped on a rake I was, like many of us, alone with someone who was afraid and had the power to do something about it. You see that day at lunch, my sixteen-year-old body had the inspiration to rap my four-foot wide scarf around its legs and think it might be different than everyone had always told me it was. On my way to the bathroom, in the hall,
“what are you wearing, Mr. Steffen?”
His tone was calm, but the transgression was un-ignorable. After hearing my I’m-really-calm-too answer, he informed me I was distracting the other students
In this empty hall
And would have to take
IT off.
That was Cinderella’s sucker-punch!
That was follow your dreams here, but only if they
Fit
In
Our story
And I’m ashamed to admit it, but I took it off.
I’m ashamed because I know so many like me have it so much worse. Blessed with white, middle-class privilege and a father who was a teacher at that vary school, I’m ashamed to admit I wasn’t the freedom fighter I had always dreamed of being. I was offered a way back over the boundary to my acceptable, non-distracting self, promised that the shocks would stop.
And I took it.
In the gender store not all the fences are labeled, but the sections all have pronouns and you better match yours up. Some for hes and some for shes, and for the rest of us, I guess we can have the furniture and appliance sections.
But really, fuck that! Fuck these fences and their motives. This male privilege shit doesn’t help me raise beautiful children. It doesn’t give good hugs or see a snotty shoulder as a medal of honor
You see my he-body doesn’t always wear he-jeans like the sexy street coddler my inner fashionista
Demands.
My he-body likes skirts that swish and jeans that hug and cloths of all kinds that let me
Be Me.
Thrift stores are my cheep salvation. They are my grandma’s sandbox-closet, where I can play at being anything I want. I can try on any costume or gender, as long as it is cheap enough to justify as a joke. All I need is enough class privilege to afford a $6.99 skirt and a $7.99 sweater
Thrift stores are where all the fences surround clearly marked sections and yet have no power, cause what thrift store can afford to pay that kind of electricity bill?
In thrift stores, I find my hir-Rahman and my hir-Rahim, a prayer my father spent countless hours trying to teach me at the mosque. I can only imagine what it would have been like had he led zhikir at a thrift store and let us cover our flawed humanity with any item we wanted to present God a more perfect human than any of us could actually
Hope to be.
Seattle, 2012
A Year of Praise
Last night, you asked me if I was a poet
And I stammered a “yes”
As we drove out over the West Seattle Bridge
Cause I figured if I was a poet
Than you could be too
And as was we sped under those grey, pink washed clouds
I decided to love you, though they warned me not to
They said you must never love a poet
But I understand why you wear those scars like bracelets and
I don’t want that to be the last choice you have
The last chapter in your personal self-help manual
So I loved you and let you love me
And left the details for tomorrow
Last week, I called you three if not four times
You were going through a rough patch
And I wanted to help
I called on the bus, on my walk home, on my bed, sitting alone, listening
While Winter’s melody played against my windows
I just needed you to know
That if you needed me
You could have me
Last month, in that cramped school hall
As all the theys streamed past
I saw you as more than gay
More than that word that connected us
I listen to you ramble on about him for hours
Reciting his statutory rape record like a love poem
But I wanted to be so much more to you
Than your latest
Creepy-old-man
Last summer, I sat on a picnic table watching
Your beautiful body pace in front of me
Absently rubbing its naked belly
Lake Wanatchee stood watch behind you
As shirtless youth stretched out across the beach
You read your poetry of record and remorse
But I couldn’t concentrate with the way the sunlight
Was dancing on your olive-brown rib-cage
You crouched, your eyes level with the wood slats of my table
Searching
And I got down on my knee on the hard concrete
To see what it would look like
And I tried to see past your sun-kissed skin
To the brilliant mind whirling in this world that saw you as less
And I redoubled my efforts when all I saw
Where your brown eyes and intoxicating smile
The ones that made me feel electric,
And dangerous
I wanted to walk with you
Through the thousand different perspectives
That came to you so easily
And I tried to be the mad-genius you dreamed of
Birthing fairy tales of sand and spit
I tried to share my deepest self with you
When all I really was was right there where you stood
I tried to live in a world of open book selves
And collaborative potato chip towers
When it was this world
That held that gorgeous, thrilling torso.
Seattle, 2011