queer theory

apparently, who we are carries an unimaginable importance
- we are, as you say, so fucking obsessed with ourselves
and we just want to talk, talk and talk, talk to people we don't even know

it's because we were never realized, of course
it's because we're in a process of perspiration
if a butch lesbian dresses himself in the attic, does the carabiner swing for anyone to hear?

my grandpa has a carabiner. it's just a piece of equipment. i'm not the kind of lesbian that wears those keen newports, those sandals for subaru drivers. instead, birkenstocks or tevas. any white girl can do it. but we do it with always our socks staying on.

(let's do it in the dark. let's do it with our socks on.)

anyway, equipment. a children's book once taught me to associate birkenstocks with hikers. what mountain am i climbing? and shout, then, from the top

i couldn't hope to tell you about the crossroads of gender and sexuality
"you don't have to like women to be a lesbian!" but i don't like men, i don't like anyone at all. of course, this is nonsense

(of course, sex is nonsense, and its nonoccurrence cannot so much as occur to me)

a costume. but you believe it. you buy it, right? it's realer than rascals on hallow's eve. and it's certainly wrong enough to inspire the ire of born-again christians

(born once. made of sin. born twice. begin agin)

not who we are, but what we are
(and let's be damned, you know, let's be damned)

what am i? i'm no one, right now, right now. i'm divorced so i'm not gay (because, you know, it only counts if you do it) but i'm nothing if i'm not gay. i'm unhappy. i'm ugly. i'm sad.

if i can't define myself by an expression of self-presentation, i'm not sure what i've really got left (i really don't feel all that smart anymore). my memory hardly lasts half a line.

but that's complaining, maintaining, that i'm stuck in victim blaming, when wallowing is self-help's worst sworn enemy

it has to be about what we are more than what we are allowed to do
and in that sense, why shouldn't we speak? why shouldn't we proclaim and facilitate?

now, the infighting, it proves unproductive. but it's a type of peer research, even so

for these terms to describe us, out to the masses, they have to be something digestible. even if we the people, individually and non-conforming, have never been promptly digestible. we've never been able to swallow ourselves.

we have to know ourselves, but we don't know want to. maybe we'd rather argue with the absence of space.

what i am, on my resume: butch with no tools. butch who can't help any femme. but butch who's a driver (tries to be a grandpa driver), butch who's can-do, butch who wears big pants and comforts the sick.

us and them. now and then. if and when. thought lost again

the point is that you want me not to explain myself. how embarrassing that we've ever set out to try! but of course that's the gap between tolerance and celebration. suddenly bias is present, again.

i don't look like an elementary school teacher. there's nothing to argue, with that. nothing ever to choose between. i look ununderstandable, and like nothing you have seen.

so let's rhyme. it's time. let's onset to rime.

dressing funny is queer. it's always been queer. elemental, sincere. you can't hide; you are here.

let's say it together, with everyone loud: i've contrived myself to be an agender aroace nonbinary butch lesbian, and i'm so impossible that i'm unintelligibly proud.