Camouflage Or Sequins

This poem is an accidental cheat. I was supposed to be rereading Marge Piercy's The Moon Is Always Female but I couldn't find my copy, so I picked up What Are Big Girls Made Of which I've owned but hadn't yet read. After the first seven poems about the death of her brother, she opened the second section with the title poem. 

While I have since gone back and read the rest of the collection, as soon as I was done reading "What Are Big Girls Made Of", I got the idea for this poem and immediately sat down and wrote it, as is.

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What Are Faggots Made Of
Adam Stone

Abandon and abandonment
An ear for vacuuming
pop culture and slang from other generations
                                                    identities not fully compatable with our tongues
Uncommon sense
Shoulders Our parents' confusion
Never knowing what to say
Saying it anyway
An array of hats
Plaid and everything that clashes
with plaid Lobster claws for cavity searches
Such senses of humor
The ability to see common ground in areas
clearly marked no trespassing
The desire to loose our tongue
in areas clearly marked no
trespassing Trespass
A belief in borders
Neighborhoods without fences but cities
with painted lines Not stars
We are not imagination
We language imagination
We speak for a we that does not have
a singular voice We are made of
                                             nothing
I am not queer because
i was a gift
for barren parents Sora would not be straight
if his mother had lived Wyatt would not have
dressed more accountant if he had less
sisters Corey's pronouns would still be corey's
pronouns if there was no church
in their shadow It is so tempting to believe
our bones are fortified tragedy We grew
strong Invasive species thriving
on the coast of straight
Pilgriming inland to
the heartland
Fish with legs
Mammals with feathers Divine
mistakes of evolution Faggots are made of
blame and fear
A lack of
science The myth of history
Aging
Loving the people
              the world is afraid to love
Glowsticks and wrestling
tights Painted
nails and shaved heads Manifestos
Lists of incongruous stereotypes
Such musical anger
A pot of boiling realizations
Disappointment in the people we try to love and
                                                               try to be The death of
casual heartache The chalk outline of puritanism
Blood so pure it could kill
you if you're not careful
A vocabulary of distance
Optimistic hyperopia
More heart than genitals Faggots are
not faggots We are
more than reclaiming the hard gs
of outdated taxonomy We are not made of
looking for conflict
Spotlight fuckers
Lip synching the gender
Karaoking the rebellion
We are not we are nots
We are waiting for a textbook understanding
that was checked out last century and is so past due
that religion has decided to
pretend they never borrowed it
We are not alone in waiting
We never want to be alone
We grow up believing the ghost story of our wrong
                                         the fables of our impending solitude
We adolesce into camouflage or
                                 sequins
We do not sleep for fear of dreaming incorrectly
Humans are made of humanity
It must be driven from us by our ancestors'
ignorance A learned fallacy
A typo in the owner's manual of our hearts