a-pocket-full-of-rodents

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

I remember when I was a kid playing at the beach

And I'd watch my cousins and my brother fight and wrestle and chase each other all over the sand

Till my feet ached

And I'd watch them and try to figure out what exactly it was,

That I didn't have

And now it's new year's eve and I'm not so different to what it was I had used to be

That same achy, eerie feeling still clings itself to the door

Still wraps itself around the scissors inching around my hair

And now it's over and I hate it, hate it

Because I swore to myself I'd be pretty. I swore if I couldn't act normal I'd just have to make up for it somehow

And it's everything I told myself I wouldn't do

I wouldn't ever be unkind to myself, I wouldn't let myself have too much fun, and I would never ever make myself more ugly on purpose

And I'm all of those things now and it feels quite nice

To not have to exist in that same way again

I remember when I was a kid at the family parties

Rooms full of people I didn't know, all in clothes I would never wear all talking amongst themselves

I used to suffocate in that house, when the family was over

And I love them, I really do, but I will never shake that realisation of knowing I am somehow, in some way, different

And it ached like hell

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

Anyway bro if you think about it like the act of girlhood is something so inseperable from the presence of myself and the perception of the world I really don't think I can grow away from it bro like honestly I have and will always be a little girl I have never known a life outside of all that has raised me in the context of femininity as twisted as that presentation may be or may have made me I am inseperable from it much as grief bro like with all the scars with all the tattoos and the dye and the constant running I will lay at a grave and she will lay in my place a weird little girl and she is me and I am her and we will weep together and we will hug and then we will die bro like every night I shake myself free of the decaying stench of my childhood bedroom and every morning I toss off the covers of familiarity but it is a twisted and uncanny familiarity that I am gripping on to before I even recognise the pale my knuckles have reached bro like if you think about it I will never shake the deep down running that has been existing not just as a girl but as a weird little girl and that is an experience repulsive in the way of religious ecstasy and sweet in the way of roadkill bro like everything I have and will do in the end I am still a twelve year old girl holding a photo of myself of myself of myself in unrecognition in love bro like the thing about girlhood is you will always be a girl you will never be a child bro like you may wreck yourself with narcissism but your bones will remember the way being someone's daughter used to taste and your ears will never mould around that lump of your skin that misses your friend group in grade 3 as you watched the boys and laughed bro like if you think about it we are all doomed to fall and fall again in the glimpse of masculine bliss that is so far detached from masculinity I can't hear my body groan anymore and bro like in the end I will return to that disgusting disfigurement of a woman I was never made to be and it will feel so so right I will kill myself in the fight to reach my heart and she, she, will look at me and she, she, will ask me what on earth have I done and I, I, will weep and it shall be the end of all seasons and we will watch the cartoons again

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

They tell me what it is to burn

What it is to loathe yourself with such vigour you can taste the blood fresh off the knife

What it is to be so abhorrently repulsed by yourself you needn't sin to taste the fruit

And they tell me, in their passion, in their plea,

It is worth it for you will live again. It is worth it for you are god.

And as I sit under the guise of flesh and bone going rotten rotten rotten

Maybe I considered they were not so far off after all

That maybe every god has been a girl. That maybe every god has been a sister, a daughter, a mother

Someone else's woman. Some man's little girl. Some father's whore

It is all the same to me. I have always been dripping with the same edge of loneliness

Hands so stained of blood and tears it's as if I have ever been anything else

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

I do not think that I was made for the act of being.

Rather that I had to be bent and broken and twisted by force into identity

Rather that I had to have my eyes forced open into facing myself in the waters of perception

That I were made to look, and to feel, and to perceive in all the wrong ways.

What has art ever been if not a grotesque disfigurement of expectation,

A guttural and shameful scream of being so desperately, hopelessly, alone?

I am afraid I will look too far inside myself

And come out howling

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

Beast of god,

Charred in the coal of the revolution,

Painted in the shadow of a cynical faith,

Show me what it is to become.

And like the dew of the grapes adorning the head of Bacchus,

Like the petals that fall at the pond where he lay,

I too shall prevail. And I too shall love.

As horrid a rendition my canvas displays, as twisted we become on the whispers of the future,

I, too, shall know the ecstacy of creation. I, too, shall fall with wax on my tongue.

Creature of the night,

Drenched in wine yet untouched,

Twisted and molded so far from what he was,

Show me what it is to beg.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

And when I am spitting out my teeth over the bathroom sink,

Bruises flourishing above the rib I so graciously bended into myself,

It is you I mourn. It is you I lie with.

And when the unholy have wept their sorrows away on silk cravats,

When all I am is a painted gaze of unfamiliarity and daydreams,

There you are. And here I am. And what a pathetic performance of conformity I used to be.

So what's the merit of being a poet if you don't know how to write?

What's the merit of symbolism when all you know is the grapes lying just out of reach?

To collect the dandelions lying still amongst the grass, to wear the mask that nature bears with it's beast-like silhouette,

To wake memorialized in blood and ash, kept behind the glass of a museum dripping with grief,

Is this not the extremity of catharsis? Is prayer anything more than bloodied fingers and bitten nails?

Not to overindulgence myself in cynicism but what's the merit of a few pretty words when all you've known is wine?

And when I am again waking as a hideous reincarnation of all you promised you would adore,

When I am again pinned up bright and holy atop a land riddled with the dead,

It is you I will recognise. It is you that I have only ever known.

And when judgement day comes knocking,

When the plains of your expectations have sated themselves on the blood of the lambs,

There you are. And here I am. And what a lovely sort of ritualistic repulsion this ballet has been.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

And at the end of the day,

I am stuck in that miserable fucking room

Pacing and pacing till my claws dull,

And my teeth fall one by one, rotten as my eyes

I forgot to feed my dog today,

He who roams his cage starved and hungry,

He who howls long into the night and swallows his words by morning,

He who nips at foreign hands through the bars of my own love, I who overfill the water bowl

It is a cruel sort of disgust, this complacency. This tolerance that could, sometimes, be categorised as compassion.

There is a dog outside my window who cries and cries and cries. In the morning I re-lock the house and at night I come crawling back.

So at the end of the day,

I am stuck, and I am waiting, in this miserable fucking room,

With this miserable fucking body, combing it's hair and sharpening it's teeth,

As it wrecks itself again and again. As I try and burn it into love.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

Lone cicada, singing prayers in a dead language,

Cloaked in the cover of a fright-less night,

How many poems before he, too, falls?

How many metamorphoses before he, too, wakes up just like me?

Lone cicada, a traveller's son, sit with me a while,

Roast your euphoria in the flames of recognition, watch it burn and crackle far far away,

You are alive in all the ways I am not,

Pull yourself up from the Styx, can you feel how alive you were?

Lone cicada, heart tuned to the step of an abandoned organ,

Let go your white robes, loosen the knot of tradition hanging off your neck,

Wipe the blood off your hands, clean your fingernails in the valley of the Nile,

Can't you see you're just like me? Can't you see we are all that we have?

Lone cicada, caught in the overhead buzz of a child's flashlight,

An anthology of words he does not understand lit up by a bedside candle

The knowledge of an existence just uneasy enough to be his own,

In the morning he will wake mutilated and free.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

And so on Judgement Day I am not worried.

What is there to fret over the presence of the divine?

And I know I have already let my grandparents bury their grandchild,

But what has ever been the harm in a little teeth and claws?

What am I if not an old portrait on a desk somewhere?

Judgement day is creeping closer and I have never felt more doomed.

Another bath should cleanse me hopelessly free of myself.

On Mondays I work at an art gallery that has exactly one hole near the ancient history section and a puddle near the impressionism.

It doesn't pay well and it makes me cry more than anything but when has art ever done the opposite? When have I been able to gaze into oils and truly admit I had not unravelled myself a thousand times over to recognise it?

And anyway this art gallery has all these sculptures and to tell you the truth I'm more of a portrait man myself but there is one that has lived through every last rendition of me yet

And he sits at the back behind a peeling gate and his artist statement is broken over with blood and small hands and he's nothing special, really, and it's silly to wax poetics about sticks in the mud

But I think I like it no more than I have grown fond of it. As every morning I touch-up the glaze and I paint him over in fresh polish and I fix up his skin with new, uncracked clay

And you know I'm standing here, a bleeding corpse with an eye for the wretched, and I wonder just how old this really is? Cuz sure, it's got the date of creation (day of mourning, day of funeral bells) right there next to it but oh god he's been sculpted and twisted so often is it even him anymore? Is any part of him whole?

When I repair the cracking in his skin what am I adding? What did I just take away? When my father scrubbed this artwork and when his father and his father and his did the same they weren't really cleaning so much as they were praying, huh? How much of this clay has been set from the beginning? How much modernism seeps in his bones?

My english teacher tells me poems aren't meant to be this long, Monty, you're meant to break them up into little words and say only the essentials so if I make a cut here and here and you can see, can't you, how condensed it now is? How much more palatable your words sound now that you aren't rushing them?

And when I went home that day and carved Eve's rib out and shaved my head and dumped my words heaved over into my sink until they clogged I think I understood. And I think, this understanding of relatability, of "is this even really a poem you're just saying things by now", I think that gave me the driving force to submit my resume

And so I think, Father, forsaken as you may be, I was not right and it was immoral and still you are wrong to deny me my wings and still you are wrong to chain my knees to your temple and god I know pretty little girls like me aren't any good for begging or howling or cursing but really when you've taken all my teeth and they've been stained a horrible shade of yellow and the tips are sharp as the claws on the lambs feet no Father I do not repent for myself and yes Father I will drag this helpless screaming body down your catacombs through my digestive track out of the gates of eden and Yes father I will love love love in anyway I can and No father I quite like my disgustingly miserable face and honestly I can't even recall what this was about and I don't know why your churches get the best architecture when there is an art gallery right next door do you see it? Do you see me? Exit stage left on the cabaret of displacement look at your beautiful lamb close your eyes and enjoy the buffet and so, in the grand scheme of things, Father, I think your prophetic day of Binaries will do me no good and I think I will skip today's pressured reinvention and then tomorrow I will wipe at my sculpture as I always do and I will wipe and scrub and clean it completely free of fingerprints of humanity of relation and I will clean this hollowed-out misshapen shell of a man as I always do as I always have and as you never cared to and Father I swear to you I will make something holy of your hands creation and I swear to you I will make something of this body. I swear to you I will not kill the one thing that I love.

On Monday mornings I take the blade and I carve myself up and on Monday evenings I take my artwork home wrapped in an almost smothering sheet.

Baths are good remedies for atheism, I have found.

And devotion is nice for Hell but really who's keeping score nowadays?

Portraits are not so good for the escapists, but there is always the chisel,

And wool on a lamb glints dark in the shadows of claws and howls.

And I do feel bad about mutilating that sweet grandchild of theirs into a burnt family portrait, I must admit.

But Jesus watches me scrub my hands till they bleed gold and he sees me puking up prayers over Sunday dinner so what's the fear in a little Religion?

Judgement day never seems to end and I am hopelessly doomed.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

God I think if I could return to the space I am loved loved loved

I would burn myself all over with it's flames

And still I would come crawling back, I always do to you

And what a barely restrained crawl that is.

Oh but how divine she looks

Draped in haze and fog, a nearly-bent caricature of all I would ever touch

A barely walking sculpture fixed in yearning and incessant belief

Oh and how quick she is to love love love

To kiss me with just the right amount of dissociation

To understand me just as perplexingly as I had lost myself in miscommunication

How how beautiful she looks indeed, dressed in all the colours my eyes can't pick up,

And god how badly I would kill (for) her,

How maddeningly I would tear her half to death in a tragic act of my own love in all the wrong actions

How decomposed my lungs would grow, hosting an ecosystem of her her her in my once vital organs

And I know it's wrong to yearn when all you've known is howling but really who is to blame?

What religion do you blame in the act of a fatal, violent devotion? For I certainly would wholly and completely submit to the anaesthetic

So what's the harm in a little claws?

Oh but how how angelic she looks,

Staining the petals of sick and blood as she reminisces of Eden

And in the morning again I am stuck with her sickening taste of absence

And again she is left in rich perfumes.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

I swear to you I will repent

I will scrub myself raw, raw, raw

Till my bones are gleaming gold in your fluorescence

And they will make me whole again. I swear I will be salvageable

I know I love you. I swear my will is good

A sculpted array of outlying and tragedy laced in your safe zone tape

Dear lover, I think I've forgotten what it is to be worthy again.

And I promise to clean up the blood, to love love love in a shade that doesn't suit the room

I will graze and forfeit and burn myself into your image, set myself in resin and cast it above the dead

Infection tasted oh so sweet coated in honey on the tips of spoons

And as I stand, divinely tragic,

In a mask not my own, in a fate worse than death,

There you are. And here I am. And I know it's rotten work but let me pray before the sacrifice

Mother, I swear I will repent.

Let me love! I swear I will make it pure!

By god I will hold it and nurture it and adore it as holy as I was before!

I will love love love her in all the right ways, in all the shades of white and divination and blessings!

And I will scrub the blood off her robes as devotedly as I had clawed my way back up to Eden

And I will whisper to her and from those whispers only prayers will grow, just as soft and love-filled as I had howled at those golden gates

And I will touch her in all the right ways and I will kiss her in the comfort of darkness, and my hands will be as devotion-filled on hers as they were leaving scars down her back.

Oh but her lips burn of anarchy and her kisses leave the storm of the revolution stinging in my catacombs

And I know once she is dead and gone for all the good ones are, she will burn burn burn and I will be left sinking in a black dress

The haystack is set ablaze and we are drowning drowning drowning. And as I give myself over to Her, the threat of god has left my mirror.

Let us burn, I swear I will make it art.

The morning crows sing of solitude and empathy

And I think, darling, art wasn't ever supposed to be pretty

And I think the bleeding mess of nerves and tattoos will bring me to salvation

I think I will confess after dinner.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

I will give myself

Wholly and truly to this altar

Praying and devoting

Until I learn to love it again

How will I ever love something so foreign to me?

How will I ever come to adore a house so misshapen, so different to me

And expect it to take me in? How will I ever wake up comfy in it's bed?

I know the temple you have made me is wrong

And horrible and ugly and so far away from what I reign

But I swear to you I am trying to love it. I swear to you I will care for it

I will give myself to her and I will love her and I will try not to break her

And I know it will take a while to transform it into something that is familiar to me

But I will wait. And I will bare it. And I will love her

By gods I will love her love her love her

I scrub this altar

Clean clean clean

So full of devotion

You can almost taste the wine

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

Happy day of creation! Happy day of divinity!

Happy day of disgrace and happy day of loathing!

God made me in his image, with his blood, with his bones

Which is to say he did not make me. Which is to say he set me up for tragedy. Which is to say he saw the crucifix coming before the apple hit the ground

Which is to say he knew just how divine I would become, and just how hopelessly doomed that made me

Happy day of hubris and happy day of repentance, I am all the soil that feeds the crows and all the scythes that reap it

It's trans day of invisibility today and I have never felt more opaque

I find a beautiful book at the bookstore bearing a rainbow sticker on their glass displays

My book is sealed in gold and details the story of a god born girl

The woman in front of me is asking where they keep the Harry Potter books.

It's a beautiful day to be sacrilegious and I think I will go outside

And I think I will choose love. And I think I will choose to smile at strangers. And I think I will choose to bear my ugly teeth of humanity to the world

And I think I will try to avert my eyes to the news station, just for today. Just while I'm bleeding. And I think I will choose to exist, as if I ever had a choice at all

It's a beautiful day to be hooked to the tv and I hope no one notices my downturned head and sharp shaky breaths.

My period arrived today and a Mormon threw a Bible into my hands. I told him in not religious. Not to his god, anyway. I left that part out

I had been sitting in bed dressed in a helpless, screaming, confused and young body not my own, pondering God and cursing his hands

And after dinner, once I was done the interrogation, I had sat alone on my toilet and pondered the divine act of handmade creation. And then I had cursed the all too human act of becoming

It's trans day of guidance today and I have never felt so lost.

Happy day of Fiesta! Happy day of purgatory!

Happy day of reinventing and happy day of fuck-i-wish-i-wasn't-you!

God made me in his image, with his mirror, with his brush

Which is to say he did not make me. Which is to say he sculpted me an unidentical, distant child modelled from a bird's eye angle. Which is to say he made me a tortured archetype of a hero, immortalized in blood and "why couldn't the bad people see?" from the lips of children thousands of future years alive

Which is to say the snake was right in tasting sin, and the fruit was right to fall.

Happy day of ecstacy and happy day of being tr@n$, I am all the gold left to wilt under the tombs of unnamed deities.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

I think I'm done with the melodramatics

But, well, what now?

You know I think I'm starting to like myself

No, that's not the right word

I think I'm starting to adore myself.

I think I'm starting to portion out a spoon of admiration of one's beauty

That usually I'd only reserve for pretty strangers and people I don't know

I think I'm starting to fancy myself beautiful

No, again, I should reread my dictionary

I think I'm starting to resemble art

And art, in all it's messy, horrifying, confronting agony

Is all the beauty a person is made of

Forgive the poetics, I've had too much to drink

Forgive the arrogance, this body and this self are young to me yet

Well, I don't really like this song

Or this outfit. Or this room

But it's okay because I'll cope with it as I've coped and lived before

But have I, really?

Am I anything more than a scared and confused toddler in the eyes of eternity,

Forever tumbling and crying as I try navigate a body I've never known before?

Mum, am I still your sweet girl? Tell me I'm still young

Please don't make me live for any longer, I'm too far behind to catch up

Oh at least I'm still pretty. At least I adore myself,

Even if this face and this existence are as furthest away to familiarity as it can be.

Oh but at least I am pretty in someone else's eyes, that reside in my own sockets

Maybe I'm forever blind to self acceptance. Maybe I'm forever young to the adults table

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

I don't feel very beautiful

I don't feel very deserving

Maybe a sedative would help?

Maybe a shedding should do

I don't wanna get married!

I don't wanna feel pretty!

Just let me feel desired! Just let me recognise myself!

One night, as I'm quite bored, I decided to visit a museum just left of my heart

A dead and plain path with one artwork

Of of a young girl, half dead, stuffed and on display with a bow

Never moving, always quiet, eye bags and eyebrows knitted with worry

And I know your god may not like it but let me completely disregard her.

Let me sympathise for the family I imagine she has, instead of feeling the pain of myself

And let me leave a rose and turn away. Let me bare not a bone in similarity

And let her family wonder where their sweet girl went. Let me wonder, too.

There's too many thoughts for my small mind

I think I'll go to bed

I hope I'm different in the morning. I hope I'm a bad influence

How many sedatives is that now? Maybe just let me one more, just while I'm still pure

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

Property, property, property,

Has the alarm gone off yet?

Can I breathe once more?

How many hours before I'm sedated?

The sale marker on boxes of hair dye

shines in my eyes like a feared angel

If I have to sit through another assembly I think I might melt

What a prayer that should be. What a curse. What a plea that is.

Personally, I think their earrings look cool, mum

Personally I think you've got better things to do

Personally I don't think at all. Personally this vent is feeling awfully impersonal

For a personalised poem by what should be counted as a person.

Am I not young? Am I not a millenia old? When is it my turn for a walk?

If I take this makeup off I'm killing myself

If I leave it on I'm dead

Either way suicide has never felt more poetic

Than spewed from the ever moving mouth of the hallway of death row

Treat me like a fucking person once in a while, why don't you?

We're not your fucking devotees, you know

Try and fucking lead us once in a while! Try and swap out that lobotomy for medicine once in a while!

Jesus had long hair too, you know.

And people have teeth and fists, too.

If you talk to me again I'm biting you. If you stare at me again I'm lashing out

The plaques of children dead moments after graduation fill my pen with art and curse words

To graffiti all over myself

If I was a god I'd scream and scream and scream.

[a-pocket-full-of-rodents]

Burning Manger

Mama says go to bed

But I think Prometheus a god in himself

The fire tells me to sleep

But her hair whispers stories of unrest

The lamb in Mary's womb kicks and kicks and kicks

And the god that bleets fear in it's manger

Has a voice of scraping knives

I thought the cross pretty till I tasted still waters

And left the unkept river of devotion aside

And yet after handling the totem

Still I worship the pardoned blade of massacration

And still I swallow my sobs

As I burn & burn & burn

In the ribcage of purity lies a feral, writhing serpent

And in the veins of the fist of expulsion Olympus runs

Papa says make something of yourself

But why then is the fawn's manger housed high, high above,

Begging for praise?

Jesus was born a grotesque little girl

With bruises and yells and too short hair

And she had been crucified in a dress

As Joseph burnt the rags of violent sacrifice slash tolerance

I don't think our saviors are ever coming home

And why should they, when artificial electricity burns just as bright as flaming bottles?

And after all, what are the divine useful for,

If not to bleed and bleed and bleed

As we nurse them back on the bottle of insatiable affection

For what a holy thing love can be,

And what a disgusting act to beg for it.

My blood family stared as I set the plates

And laugh at my table manners.

At the sight of mine own fangs I am implored to go to bed

A dilapidated church leaves a wailing lamb behind.