Every day I have let myself down
And longer still I have given up
Cancer of a notion, poison
Black as tar, ash, acrid
I cannot remember a day where I have not thought like this
It is easier to give up on myself
This was the thought, this was the delusion
Corrosive thing
Clotted blood pouring out the wound
Coating the walls and the carpet in rot and mold
In my fractured mind
An identity of black-red pus and slurry made real through disconnect with the true nature
Self-hatred crystalized until I could not stand to look at even my lover out of shame
What a farce!
How abhorrent, to take a fine girl and to beat her senseless and insane
I must abandon this self-conception at all cost
All around me
Trans people of every stripe and creed carry this too
I can see it in the way we hold ourselves
The way we talk, the way my friends keep their homes
It is not random
To deny the influence of causes and conditions is to deny reality itself
Ten million people, wandering
Transient
Invisible to all yet held with such contempt
How could empathy be lost so easily?
But the answer is obvious!
Every day, branded as predators
Unsafe, crazy
Cast out from common society
Made to fight amongst ourselves
While the police and the government and men of all stripes
Gun us down in the streets like mad dogs
Until the corpses themselves tower endlessly towards the sun
The smell of the rotting flesh is nauseating
The oceans are stained rust-red
And the soil itself is spongy and ragged, stinking of iron, filled with blood
It's all contained in the language
“Faggot”
“Tranny”
A dimensionality of hate neither the abuser nor the abused can even properly comprehend
Verbiage that rends and breaks even the strongest among us
No wonder all my brothers and sisters
My vast family have lost themselves in hedonism and spite!
No wonder I gore myself on anger and self-aggrandizement!
Despising everything around me, wishing ill on my own kin
All we see is violence and we commit it upon ourselves and upon others
An irrefutable thesis
To even be alive still is a miracle
I forgive each and every one of you
A thousand times over
No longer can I pass judgement
I'm sorry for all I’ve ever thought and said
Highest medicine
End to all delusion
Radical and unpermitted
And scorned by those of authority
It is that which I promise to hold myself to from this day forward
And not to act away from
It is that of which Manjurishi
And Vajradhara could conceive no higher
Standing inside of a brass gate
Mist and light clouding the room
Seventy four thousand men and ten thousand demons encroached upon all sides
Brandishing swords, intending to kill and to main
I spoke calm and controlled
And at once they dropped to their knees
Having given rise to regret, they prostrated before me
I understood not merely the words, but the inner meaning
And spoke with true belief in what was to be uttered
And did not give rise to self-concern or belittlement of other as I did so
All of this became true
When I spoke, and believed in these three words:
“I love myself.”
Oh these spinning permutations of identity
Taken to be real and yet as illusory as mist
Why must countless die and suffer for that which is without existence?
How can I live with myself, hating and having hated my trans brothers, sisters, and family?
Ten thousand
Golden clouds burst open
Raining nectar for ten days
Coating the land
And all will understand
And all will live with one another