Mostly here for the fandom

This month is the one year anniversary of posting my poem “Condolences” to TikTok and Instagram, where it amassed millions of likes and tens of thousands of comments.

Since, people have used the poem for adaptive art pieces, short plays, books, and class work. For your piece of art to be transformed into another…it’s difficult to describe.

After several rejections from poetry publications a decade ago, I decided to post my work online instead. The responses were overwhelming. I realized that an official publication doesn’t make you a poet. Writing poetry does, and bonus points if you manage to resonate with just one other soul who needed to hear what you needed to say.

I was utterly taken aback by the response to this piece. People have asked me many times to explain it, but from the response it was clear that the meaning can be explicated with a little time.

Some people who didn’t understand it until it was explained were angry when it came together. It wasn’t written for them.

I’m only grateful that it reached the people who needed it.

I feel that the imagery is part of the piece, but I know not everyone can or cares to listen to a video. Here is the poem:

———————

They buried a girl in my hometown today.

“A young woman, gone too soon, in the prime of her life,” they all said.

My friends and I all knew her. We grew up together.

We were in all the same classes and hobbies and we made up games together at recess.

But none of us went to her funeral. We weren’t invited, because the people planning it didn’t think we’d understand. They said it wasn’t our loss.

So we got together for drinks. We laughed all morning and played card games all day.

At 4 o’clock, we heard the church bells. We saw that long, sad procession of cars stretch like a creek through town, up the cemetery hill.

We heard strange rumors that night, that the casket was empty. That they put it hollow in the ground.

So we went to the plot first thing in the morning. They buried her empty box next to her dad, down the row from an estranged aunt she never really knew all that well.

There wouldn’t be a stone for months, but the little placard had my name on it. But not the one I go by these days.

“How strange,” we all said. “What a waste of good crying.”

All of this mourning for me, and I was down the street the whole time, laughing and drinking.

But some people will never understand. They’d rather plan a funeral than learn a new name.

My friend said she felt sorry for them, in some small way.

What a sad notion—to lose a daughter who never lived—

i feel like its necessary to point out, again, that a lot of the world is going all in on renewable energy. fossil fuels have become bad business. yes, even under profiteering capitalism.

a lot of the biggest investors are not interested in investing in fossil fuels anymore and have been divesting from fossil fuels because its too risky and unstable and destined to become stranded assets that will stop turning a profit. a good portion of the money going towards fossil fuels is from governments (like the u.s and canada) that are propping up these industries with government subsidies. basically, the taxpayer is flipping the bill.

and governments are using the general population's ignorance when it comes to renewables and electrification to convince the tax-paying public to continue supporting the oil and gas industry with this untrue data-defying argument that doing so is necessary and important for the future of the economy.

- hourglass body shape

- tiny waist

- long legs

- large eyes

- no body hair

conclusion:

Maybe your parents and your grandparents and great-grandparents were among those people - or maybe they weren't, personally. Some people admittedly aren't.

But every human alive is part of an uninterrupted line of hundreds of thousands of years of descent (and that's only since we became Homo sapiens).

We, as humans, have created and built and invented and learned and treated and cured so, so much. Because we kept looking around us, and looking at the people around us, and saying, "I want a better world for the people I love. I want a better world for the people who will come next."

Or perhaps think about it this way:

Would you want your great-grandchildren (or the great-grandchildren of your loved ones / family / chosen family, if you'd rather) to be miserable?

The pit token (and locker key) was something my grandad had when he worked in a coal mine. Every day he would have it over and receive his safety lamp, and go down the pit to mine coal. At the end of the day if there were any tokens left on the board then they'd know that there was still someone in the pit.

My grandad was an intelligent man. He was politically motivated, wrote letters to the local MP, read countless books about many subjects, listened to a wide variety of music, etc. But he worked down that pit for years to pay for a house and home for three kids. He broke his back down that pit. When his best friend died he locked himself in his shed with a bottle of rum cause obviously Men Don't Cry and he couldn't be seen. He fought in world war 2 and killed men in battle, and he never spoke about it unless asked.