Happy pride month🏳‍⚧🏳‍🌈❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

Being queer can be really hard and challenging especially when you have to face not only yourself and your pre-established ideals but the entirety of society sometime, whether you're in or out of the closet, labeled or not and regardless of everything else, you're queer enough and you're loved.
Keep going! Enjoy this month and use it as a chance to embrace your identity be kinder to yourself 💚

There never was a face as fair as yours,
A heart as true, a love as pure and keen.
These things endure, if anything endures.
But, in this jungle, what high heaven immures
Us in its silence, the supreme serene
Crowning the dagoba, what destined die
Rings on the table, what resistless dart
Strike me I love you; can you satisfy
The hunger of my heart!

Nay; not in love, or faith, or hope is hidden
The drug that heals my life; I know too well
How all things lawful, and all things forbidden
Alike disclose no pearl upon the midden,
Offer no key to unlock the gate of Hell.
There is no escape from the eternal round,
No hope in love, or victory, or art.
There is no plumb-line long enough to sound
The abysses of my heart!


There no dawn breaks; no sunlight penetrates
Its blackness; no moon shines, nor any star.
For its own horror of itself creates
Malignant fate from all benignant fates,
Of its own spite drives its own angel afar.
Nay; this is the great import of the curse
That the whole world is sick, and not a part.
Conterminous with its own universe
the horror of my heart!


—The Buddhist, Aleister Crowley.

Oh, I could call you names now. List a hundred reasons for why you were awful. But what would that do? Where would it leave me? I still loved you. I still have to live with that.

—Sue Zhao

The beaten dog comes to the doorstep to lay a dead bird, gazing up at his owner and salivating over his love like it's meat. The bird remains untouched, rotting slowly, much like the words I pen about you. A text becomes an empty soliloquy if not offered, just like everything else. I tiptoe, in what seems like the delicate hops of a bird more than the strides of a human, along the tree-lined street we once roamed. Fragile is this path, like our own frailty. The trees quiver beneath the scorching sun, and the birds chant your name like a sacred prayer, while I am engrossed in the task of staying within the lines of the bricks. The road stretches vast before me, too daunting to traverse head-on; I meander along its edges, a habit born from a childlike fear, to shield you from harm, away from vehicles that could crush you like a helpless deer. Yet, in your absence it's a way for me to make the street smaller.
I persist in reminding my heart not to crumble or mourn, It's but a single rock sunk amidst the vast ocean; countless others surround it in a similar hue. I catch glimpses of you sometimes, wearing the same blue shirt. I attempt to peek into the depths of your soul, to carve out a place for myself there—a discreet friend, an ornament, something unobtrusive, small enough to not be an annoyance. I shall diminish myself, like an ant faithfully trailing your steps, even if it takes me years.
Just as Jesus made peace with the seven wounds that adorned his body, I strive to make peace with the fragments of you that reside within me. I must find solace in the half-empty bench we once shared, the unfinished plans, the the color blue, and the confusion of where to place my hands if not between yours. I shall wander the desert for forty days, starving myself, yet I lack the magnitude of prophets; I do not embark on this journey for my people nor God, but rather to repent and beg for the claw marks I left upon your body to heal.
I look at you with pride and love, like a devoted mother who warms your meals after a long day of not talking to you; she plays a role, finding contentment in simply being present, in providing warmth through cooked food and folded laundry. I free you from your confines; I open the cage for you to fly from the burning building while I succumb to the flames as an act of atonement. I free you, but I'll always be sleeping on your doorstep with my dead birds, hopeful that one day you will discern that my actions extend beyond an animalistic instinct to hunt for you, but a violent broken form of human love.

Wrote that instead of coping normally with my emotions hope you like it🙏🏻

My dreams of you
Are always
Softer than you are.

— Eileen Myles, Sleepless.

Then write a poem about the fact
That you've never been faithful to anyone,
Always kept one hand feeling along the walls
For a knob, a hinge, a latch
To release the pressure in the chamber

— Seema. Raza from "permission," A constellation of half-lives

The birds insist on pecking the wooded dark. The wooded dark
pecks back. It is time to show the universe what you are capable of,
says my horoscope, increasingly insistent this month.
But what I am capable of is staring

at the salt accident on the coffee table & thinking,
What sad salt. I admire my horoscope
for its conviction. I envy its consistency. Every day. Every day,
there is a future to be aggressively vaguer about.

Earlier today, outside the cabin, the sudden deer were a supreme
headache of beauty. Don’t they know I am trying to be alone
& at peace? In theory I am alone & really I am hidden,
which is a fine temporary substitute for peace, except I still

have email, which is how I receive my horoscope, & even here
in the wooded dark I receive yet another email mistaking me
for another Chen. I add this to a folder, which also includes
emails sent to my address but addressed to Chang,

Chin, Cheung. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier
was convinced I was Chad. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier
did not quite finish the n on my Chen, & when my tall mocha was ready,
they called out for Cher. I preferred this by far, but began to think

the problem was Starbucks. Why can’t you see me? Why can’t I stop
needing you to see me? For someone who looks like you
to look at me, even as the coffee accident
is happening to my second favorite shirt?

In my wooded dark, I try insisting on a supremely tall,
never-lonely someone. But every kind of someone needs
someone else to insist with. I need. If not the you
I have memorized & recited & mistaken

for the universe—another you.

—Chen Chen, Nature poem.