A pretty thick

slice

of hell

That was life

so far

But today things

will change

Today he was six

years

old and that meant old

enough to

guide his blind father

on the streets

The old man was only

blind for

a year after some work

related accident involving acid

And there was a mother

somewhere too. She left

shortly after

father’s accident

Today father held on

to his son’s shirt

at the shoulder and told him

to walk towards the

railway

“I want to listen to

the train,” said father

but it turned out he

wanted much

more than that. He wanted to

feel the train. Against

his face

So he stood on the rails

and told the kid

to go back home

and return after an hour or so

“Okay,” said the kid. But

he didn’t leave. He watched

from a safe distance

Didn’t even find

the

event particularly disturbing

Then he went back home

and had some

fruit loops with milk

and his first taste of

beer

He had become a

man

***

https://bogdandragos.com/2021/01/19/feeling-the-train/

I want I want

To go to bed

But words, they flutter

In my head

Like watching swarms of wasps or bees

Like hearing whispers through the trees

Like waiting for a tiger’s pounce

But with no rest, no wink or ounce.

I think I’m meant to be a writer

I’m far too critical to fail

I know in person I get nervous

And my thoughts sometimes derail

But on paper it’s a different story,

One that helps me boast in glory!

But then again perhaps I should hide

My shameful and disgusting pride

Cause I’m no better than another

Cause I can stitch some words together

It means far more I’m treated kind

Than showing you what’s in my mind

So I stay silent

My silent bind

Is it for your sake?

Or for mine?

My eyes wide

In awe

At the length

Just there

Before my very eyes

And before my very lips.

Temptation beckoned.

I quivered as it stood erect

So thick and juicy

And this would be my first.

I licked my lips

Moving ever closer to its tip

Before easing my tongue out to lick a dribble

That trickled down the side

And that was enough to suck me in

To desire more.

Greedily I moved my mouth

Engulfing the tip of this huge beast.

Hmmm

A moan of ecstasy escaped

As I tasted this pleasure,

Juices dribbling down my chin.

The taste of mustard and onions filled my senses

As I bit the end off this Jumbo Hotdog.

I was in Heaven.

It was the first of many Jumbo Hotdogs

That winter's night

At the fair.

I love the way your nose

Turns up a little at the end

And how your eyes close

When you kiss him.

It shows your tenderness.

God, I hate kissing him

Especially when Gary is here.

I have to close my eyes

To stop myself looking over

And gazing at him

Wishing I were kissing him.

God I hate kissing her

Especially when Gary is here.

I’m glad she closes her eyes

So she can’t see me gazing over her shoulder at him

Wishing I were kissing him.

This is a great wedding.

I'm so pleased my two best friends got married.

I wake surrounded by sensations. A mild painlike sensation aches in my groin area. I become aware of white and lighting. A pressure in my arm, my finger. I'm not alone. Someone is leaning on my bed, others are close. I hear a muffled conversation. I can't quite understand what they are saying.

My senses gradually make sense. The white, the lighting, the pressure, the people around me. It's my mom leaning on the bed and the pressure in my arm is the UV, and I have a finger monitor. I hear odd bits of words, "school," "changes," "work," "what do we call," "big change." The bits make more and more sense, but I'm uncomfortable.

That aching in my groin is the only thing I haven't understood. I remember when my dad was in the hospital. It wasn't long ago and I can still remember his waking up complaining. He needed to go to the bathroom. He wanted the tubes out. They hurt, he said. The nurses and my mother told him to just relax and pee in bed. He tried to get out of bed multiple times (unsuccessfully- the drugs really did a number on him). He mumbled over and over how he was uncomfortable and how he needed to go to the bathroom. It was all he said and all he could think of.

"You're awake!" My mom looks funny. She's been crying and looks stretched. The rest of the family surround me. Dad says something I can't quite get. He's dad, so it was funny, and I smile. There's my sister. She's angry at something. I'm too tired to want to know what it is she says. I can't care when I'm like this. My brother's not there. I wonder if he couldn't make it. It must have been an emergency, this procedure. I can't remember there being anything wrong with me.

I try to speak, try to ask them what's going on, but my mouth doesn't cooperate. My lips barely seem to move and I croak instead of talk. Mom looks around her.

"Do you want an ice cube?"

I want water, but I'm not sure if water would choke me. I'm not sure I can control myself enough right now. I hate feeling so weak. I nod. She feeds me the ice cube, dropping freezing cold water on my chin by accident. I shiver. It's so cold. Freezing.

I do my best to ask with my face what's going on. Why am I in a hospital? Why do I feel so strange? My family exchanged glances that only fed the fuel. What was going on here?

My mom clears her throat. "We had to do it to save your life. That's the reason."

Did what? I couldn't understand. Why hadn't she just told me. I hate suspense. In my passion, I forget that I have ice in my throat and it flies out of my mouth as my jaw tightens in anger. I try to shoo the helpful hands away and push the hand away that was trying to give me another piece of ice.

"What?" I croak. "Do what?"

She sighs, but she's the indicated one to tell me. The others support her, but they don't speak up. "You're a boy now."

I shake my head. No! There are plenty of explanations for the ache in my groin. Sure, I suddenly realized that the ache seemed to be outside of my body, or what used to have been the limits of my body. I could feel blood pumping in a place that before nothing had occupied. But that was a catheter. It was a ghost sensation. It wasn't...

I don't want to be a guy. I don't want to be a guy. The thought resounded. In fact, it didn't seem like any thought I'd ever had before. It was like an impulse or instinct. I squeezed my eyes shut as tears continued to flow. I don't want to be a guy.

My eyes open. A light from the window shines warmth onto me and I see, not a hospital like I thought, but my dorm room. I don't want to be a guy. I saw my minion poster, my wardrobe, my desk. No family, no surgery; I was alone and as I always was. I threw the blankets from my body and saw my usual Eeyore pajamas. I don't want to be a guy.

Tears ran down my cheeks and I was startled by the horror and disgust and betrayal I felt from a dream! It was a bizarrely strong sensation that I'd never experienced before. It brought up memories. One of my best friends from elementary to high school disappeared after graduation and next I knew, she was he. He'd communicated with other friends, but not me. I still don't know why, but I don't have his information to talk to him. I've never interacted with him as a man, so he remains a girl to me. It's hard to rewrite memory. I'm still sorry the relationship didn't continue.

My relationship with the trans movement is complicated. My objection to the movement is its part in a larger message that we should define ourselves and our relationships by our sex, (not meaning by being male or female, but by sexy sex). The changes a trans person makes are to sexual organs (asides from breasts, which is a topic for another time). We talk about relationships and persons as if we are all about sex. In media and self-help and pretty much every thing I read and see, suggestions abound about sex lives.

It seems that if a partner isn't into the other partner's kink, that's it for the relationship. If things are "boring in the bedroom," that's the relationship over and done. You have to make sure that the sex is good. Kisses need to be fireworks or you've never been kissed. I could name genres of movies, books, TV shows, and countless other means that the message has been transmitted that love is sex and sex is love. I vehemently disagree. I am not defined by the kind of sex I am or am not having!

Looking specifically at the trans movement, the literature seems to equate their identity with their sexed body. I personally don't see how changing their appearance, their breasts, and/or sexual organs changes anything fundamentally about themselves. I don't always conform to my gender and I certainly didn't growing up. It took many years for me to accept my body as part of who I was. My identity is always in flux as I continue to change, so I don't understand arguments that say that matching the body to one's identity is necessary.

Objections stated, I believe in the right to choose. I believe that if someone wants to change themselves, they have the right to do so despite any objections. I also believe that we do not have a right to be cruel to other people when they disagree or however they identify themselves. Cruelty is never warranted. I am especially disappointed at cruelty in the name of religion, which seems the greatest hypocrisy of them all.

When I woke up in tears, I realized that I do identify myself as a woman. I always thought that I'm me, and I am more than body or gender, although I inhabit my body and "woman" describes me in the way that "polygon" describes several geometric shapes. I had complained about the nuisance of having boobs, a menstrual cycle, no pockets on pants, and all that girl stuff. But now... now I realized that for all the nuisance, I didn't want it to be any other way. I don't want to be a guy. That truth still echoes somewhere in my head and it helps me understand a little bit better.

#trans #transgender #identity #nonfiction #dream #SocialCommentary

ChaChiRox wears mismatched socks

Her name apparently came from a tv show on Cox

Late night, she rhymes right, no need to fight

Because she’s divine

Define rights-when so many I see are doing wrong

Finds her power putting words into song

I'm sitting in a tube station lined with red cream tile. The scene flickers back and forth, from vivid technicolor to grainy black and white, as if shot through the gritty lens of an arthouse film. It's oppressively silent, the stale underground air tensing for the arrival of a train. I'm completely alone, folded into a glazed plastic chair. Suddenly, across the tracks is seated a man in a tangerine suit, stiff-backed and expectant. He seems to have been waiting there for hours, yet a moment ago, I was solitary. The tangerine man begins screaming and gesticulating wildly, his face contorting grotesquely as spittle flies like bullets from his mouth. “You are worthless,” he shrieks, his sunken eyes smoldering like burnt marches in their sockets. I turn to answer, but see that he is speaking, not to me, but to the empty red seat beside him. “You are nothing,” he screams to the plastic chair. “You are nothing, nothing!”

The screech of the incoming train drowns out his hysteria. The train pulls into the station and I step on. The inside is an empty tube, painted blindingly white, and as I stand in the center of the carriage, sluggish, plaintive strains of music begin to play from tinny speakers. For a moment, amidst the rattle of the train, the eerie tune and the glaring white walls of the car, time seems to draw to a halt, and my breath crumples like paper in my throat.

The train grinds to a stop, and a deadpan female voice announces: "Move away from the doors." As I step out, the train and its tracks evaporate, and I am left standing in solitude, ankle-deep in a shallow lake, which extends unbroken to the darkening skyline. The lake is calm, like a silken robe embroidered with the silver light of the overhead moon. In the far distance, beyond the haze of the horizon, stands a murky silhouette, contours fuzzy, reality bleeding into mirrored reflection.

I know, at a glance, it is you.

Writing is a funny thing. There are moments where it is a meditation, a prayer, simple as breathing— deep and complete— to clear the conscious for the next day's sensory onslaught. At other times, it's a record, a document— a multi-faceted snapshot— pocketed for later to avoid Memory's insidious hide-n-seek. And at it's best, it's an orchestration of Thought— a map. Sense leading the senseless to the source of Art, by mere suggestion and shared illusion, so that we might all be disabused of Ourselves— our hands and faces pressed against an ice cold reflective glass. Writing is like some unsought conquest, a brain game, to which the intellect is challenged to the Death by the grinning mask of Life itself— with a toast and a jest. Though I may drag my feet, the gauntlet is mine, and I am inexplicably called to pick up the fight, no matter the length or cause of my retreat. And we make gains from time to time— because writing always helps us, somehow, to individually and collectively survive amid the infinite cobwebs that are always crisscrossing our subconscious mind.

#WhyWrite #Challenge #Addendum

I'll never be like Edgar Poe

I'll be myself and try hard though.

For I know love, and I know loss.

And I know words, and I've been crossed.

The heart I've got could write all day,

The mind I've got can make it that way.

I'm dark sometimes, but love brings light

I'll write about how love's light bites!

I'll write until the day I die,

but I'll never be Poe

- and how could I?