conan

“Yeah does that hurt? Oh you poor thing it’s okay.”

“No no I can’t stop. you feel too good I promise you can take it I promise”

“Aw your being so noisy does it feel good? No? I’m sorry puppy i really am. Just be a good boy for me it’ll feel good soon.”

“Shhh I’m not being that rough. Take deep breaths baby. I know I know it’s a lot.”

Glistening in the gold trims of sunlight

The planet spins, vivid and lively as shower-borne ideas

That blossom with the summer flowers

As water and stars alike rain from the heavens

To cleanse the life it lovingly hosts

Like the very first pulse of life on Earth,

An unborn song demanding to be sung

It is breathing, alive!

My tire pressure light has been on

since the cold sunk its bitter fangs into

the soft nerve endings rotting in my own.

False alarm, but I won’t check

to see if they need more air

because the last time

I was stranded, the people at the bar took

such good care of me it made me

want to live in this world again,

to dance in the snow and feed the corvids

not with my body, but the peanuts I keep

in my car for them.

The starling taunts me with her false alarms;

I’d like to think they know what

they’re doing to me but the sad part is that

they’ve not a clue.

The words have no translation,

murmurs and shards of sound

and empty shapes made only for

the sake of proving that they can.

No message after the chime,

only a ghost or

an apparition of one,

something homesick and

weeping for its nonexistence.

( Confusion is the goal, I suppose,

but I’m certain of what it means

to me, which is that it means nothing,

and that is a meaning of itself. )

I saw my friend lying in a coma,

only he was awake,

wide-eyed and terrified, and his eyes

are big and dark as coal on a good day,

but they were black holes in that

they stole the light from the room

and no amount of science will answer

where it could have gone.

Beady, like a crow’s-

a scared one.

Those coals grayed to ashes,

all the fire suffocated. I’ve seen

many a man’s soul leave

his body while he was

still alive, but I felt that ghost

weeping again for the diamonds that

could have been- I still feel it.

I love the vultures and

what they do for the ecosystem, nature’s

janitorial staff,

but I need them to wait their turn.

There is life left to be lived, phantoms

with unfinished business

here on planet Earth.

Fly away, now; I’ll make it up to you

embellisher

You spite me as a real brother would

But an empty space cries in your absence,

louder than the wailing strings

that spoke all the things you never could,

And I’m as idiotic as you, I suppose,

because I would give back the quiet,

tidy house

For your endless chatter and TV noise,

the humorless jokes and bickering,

too-loud whines of your guitar amp

far too late at night,

All the things I took for granted

Because my blood runs lukewarm at best,

but you, music man,

are the brother I lost at birth,

foreignly refreshing,

like coming up for air

after years of drowning.

like finally learning how to breathe

without water in my lungs.

i didn't know her name yet

but i was swimming

towards the sunlight

in hopes of finding her.

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.