I am the only boy I ever wanted to tear my dress off for.

[halfcactus]

Just found out from this post that Andrea Gibson has passed away... I don't listen to a lot of spoken-word but I remember them being one of my introductions to it, alongside Sarah Kay. More importantly theirs were the first poems I've read that were about gender, and I think that changed me, in a way.

Anyway, I reread Take Me With You last night, so here are some passages from it.

I explain my gender by saying I am happiest on the road when I'm not here or there, but in between, that yellow line coming down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam.

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I find great comfort in knowing that anyone who has ever broken up with me has probably never gotten over my dog.

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In gym class, a girl called me a dyke and I didn't have the language to tell her she was wrong and right. I just showed up at her house promising to paint my fingernails red with what would gush from her busted face if she ever said it again.

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It's true what they say about the gays being so fashionable, our ghosts never go out of style. Even life is like funeral practice, half of us already dead to our families before we die. Half of us still on our knees trying to crawl into the family photo.

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For Halloween I'm going to be "emotionally stable." No one is going to know it's me.

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What I know about living is that the pain is never just ours. Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo, so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window, when I can see what I couldn't see before.

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Let me say right now for the record: I'm still gonna be here asking the world to dance. Even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet. You, you stay with me here, okay? You stay here with me. Raising your bite against the bitter dark, your bright longing, your brilliant fist of loss. Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other, my God that is plenty. My god that is enough. My God that is so, so much for the light to give. Each of us at each other's backs whispering over and over and over, "Live. Live. Live."

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"That I commint to a life of opening and learning, that I commit to learning at a speed that is vigilant and awake. That I commit to knowing where my empathies lean and why they lean there, that I become increasingly familiar with the why of what raises my voice, that I become increasingly familiar of what lulls me to silence, that I be haunted by the ghost of who my silences have harmed, that I acknowledge that haunting is not unkindness, that I acknowledge that haunting is love, that I trust love lives in whatever points at the dark, that I acknowledge that shame i rarely the seed of compassion, that I acknowledge shame would likely be my laziest gesture, that I stop denying I am a whole person, and my wholeness is often unlovable, and my wholeness is often lovable, that I own the possibility that there isn't a thing one could say about the person I am that I could wholeheartedly, all of it—yes, all of the ugly—yes, all of the beauty—yes, I have failed and will continue to fail.

I have loved and will continue to love, I am committed to learning and opening, I want people around me who are committed to learning and opening, people who are failing and loving, people who are stalking their own vigilance, the speed of their own compassion, saying, "Faster faster faster."

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