Yesterday
April Penn the psychology of the oppressed where mental health is the ability to repress knowledge of the world’s cruelty ~ Audre Lorde, "Eulogy for Alvin Frost" In North Dakota, "security officers" beat, tear-gassed, and released loose dogs upon indigenous protesters yesterday in America while the adult children of the two main presidential candidates gave interviews that news broadcasters said, "Humanized them," relinquishing viewers from thinking about nonrenewable energy, the destruction of clean drinking water, the increasing temperature of the ocean preceding mass die off of ocean species... the genocide suits that we're born into don't look down you'll see I don't know what to say. People say/I find myself saying The system is corrupt The people who I agree with feel like they are going to die young or live old lives repeating the same reminders like a game of telephone where no one knows what sentence we started with. Do you really think we would defeat planet Earth? Earth will always win! There is a fantasy of the oppressed being secretly more powerful. Like kissing death.
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The title of this poem is a slight alteration of a line by Audre Lorde: "I see much better and my eyes hurt." I like the straight-forward honesty of her book Black Unicorn. There were a series of ideas I had about what to write for my interaction but when I got to the fourth section of the book, this idea I have been trying to articulate for the last few years took form. I don't think this is the final draft of this poem but it wouldn't be this far without reading her work. I See Much Better Now That My Eyes Hurt
Adam Stone You can not call me crazy now that we have queer vocabulary lessons and a dialect on our own television networks Now that pride has been appropriated into us How we parade the most entertaining stereotype Swishen fetchit the spectacle We are not diagnosable we just are But some of us can step outside our lack of the current buzzword privilege to see that some of us are crazy not in the funny hat sense (that's usually religious) but in an inability to separate our I from our us The separation of sexuality and sanity is not church and state anymore than the separation of masculinity and rape is sports and gambling Trying to talk about a person outside of their generalization is not so much unheard as unlistened to We defend the borders of our identity so vigilantly we should be fascist billionaires by now Enough us Enough we I I am silent now when unsure I am listen when not my experience I am never sure when I am too prideful not proud but supporting my fellow lions I am staring at the center of my own Venn Diagram of sexuality and (everyone has mental illness instead of responsibility) responsibility I don't like how I overlap with people I don't like |
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