“all oppression is connected, you dick!”

She screams at my face and my heart beats faster, my hands get sweaty, I can’t breathe, I can’t think, all I want to do is cry and cheer and love and “kill mother-fuckers who stay stupid shit to me.”
She says everything I have ever felt. The way she growls her pronounced “r’s” and “ow’s” and kills with her “c’s” and “k’s” hit me like capitalism hits me every day. Like homophobia hits me like the garbage from car windows. This time, however, it isn’t trash or consumerism or money but it is solidarity. Her fist is up in the air and her words light the flames to everything I have ever wanted to burn: society and the faux-leftist agenda of assimilation to create people as people as humans and not as queer or black or working-class or woman or undocumented or disabled or. . . the idea that our humanity brings us together rather than our different lived experiences.

“the new fangled fallacies / of sexual and racial freedom for all / these under-informed / self-congratulating / pseudo-intellectual utterances / reflect how apolitical the left has become”

–

6pm. I step into the room as a role call of identity rings out and my ears begin to bleed. I hear calls for [marriage] equality and my ring finger shrivels away to fall off by my aching feet. I feel awkward yet alive in a space that I worked to build 2 years ago, but today it is another’s. I inch closer to the man in all leather and rubber and platform boots and red hair, soaking in the past quicker than the room realizes that MBLGTACC 2013 is here. Right now.

We sit together in the Lansing Center amidst our intersex, transgender, lesbian, bisexual, gay, gender-non-conforming [etc.] identities. This chance comes once a year and it is in this moment when I realize that I better pay attention. Pay attention to what is said what I agree with what I actively hate what I love. Pay attention to the space and the community and the environment because come 48 hours from now I will be in a different society. Breath it all in till my lungs fail.

–

“the time to act is now! / Now! while there are still ways we can fight / Now! because the rights we have are still so very few / Now! because it is the right thing to do / Now! before you open the door to find / they have finally come / for you”

The ending to her poem scares me. My thoughts are radical, my thoughts aren’t normal, my thoughts will get me into trouble. Future tense. I want to run out of the room and fight for everything I believe in, but I stay seated. I want to protest and burn and educate and learn and be checked, but I hang out with friends and dance at a club. I want to scream at the top of my lungs–so instead I’ll write at the top of my lungs.

Good poetry is aesthetic–sure. Good poetry performs well–not always. Good poetry gets you out of your seat, makes you throw a book or strip naked, and makes you come alive–yes.

Good poetry is truth.

Staceyann Chin is my poet of choice. She comes on stage from flying with her baby and lays it all out. She acts along with her poetry, she performs her emotions, and she screams as if she is dying. Never in my life have I been so affectively affected.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofsVwH4O_k