FoundAlongRoad

All the memories gave me perspective
There’s a reason I always built
Queer chosen families
Or isolated
The world is growing but most have never been alright
Compounded by the small town mind
Growing up around here
You gotta search for standards
Can see all the spectrum in one day..

In old houses
We used to talk about
The nuance of abuse
Like when he’d weaponize incompetence
And what can be unlearned vs what constitutes
Manipulation
There was conversation
Effort from every angle
And when there was screaming
Far between
There was recognition
Of what it means
The unhealthy the unhealed
And there was change
We all had stories of bruises
And refused to be our parents

Now I hear offhand comments
About dripping blood and constant
Taunts I wouldn’t give
To an enemy
Like it’s normal
Like it’s anything resembling love
Not walking wounds
Trauma dressed up into
A slow decline into denial
Normalizing an air of violence
Even before it’s physical
The straights are rarely ok
And sometimes it’s us too
Then a community calling it out
And sometimes they’re curved just enough to get to the baseline
To define what isn’t right
To hold a mirror and not break in the light

We used to talk for hours
About how we got here and who we want to be
We used to embrace the psychology
Of what was still bleeding and how to treat it
Of what wasn’t okay and improve it
In most homes I’ve made
Like the poem about
In my house there will be no
Insert every bad thing
We were raised with
And we’ve never been perfect
But taking a second to sit back
And look at everything I’ve been ignoring,

Cuz there isn’t a choice here
It’s like being on another planet
And I don’t want you to have to live there
But you cling to it like you think the atmosphere
Anywhere else couldn’t contain life
But everything is dying here
Sparkling potential sending out pieces of something beautiful
Colliding with avoidance, with refusal
Suffocating like a tomb
A grave to who you could’ve been
Rusted tools untouched
Walls peeling
The decay from a certainty
That love and life have to be this way
I know it’s so complex
But looking at it
From the outside
The oxygen is thin here
And I remember what it is to breathe
Easier