A Closet Cellular

Guanyin told me she doesn’t fuck with gender-
but lately the tedium and overcrowding is rising to my ears,

And I can feel the smoke, the steam, the chorus.

and so I forgo the skirt and color,
exchanging an uncertain safety for an uncertain freedom,
one trauma for another, and at the top of hills,
where the cityscape roars towards me,

Lit by the last vestiges of mutual mercy and a consistent neon blitz,
I am chided for my systemic refusals. I am godless, childless, personless:
they say, a coward. I hear the whispers of translucent ghosts, fluttering past,
calling me a coward, and when I fall to my knees in these cities it is only
to cry. A coward. This is my sinner’s lament-
unable to reconcile or love myself, unable to give myself to another. And now I am simply
an outline in a world full of fleshed out shapes, pretending to be dimensional. I cannot be

what they expect of me.