Midnight above us
Asking my lover once more:
Tell me who I am
The author and site owner can be reached at leeundercedartrees@gmail.com.
Midnight above us
Asking my lover once more:
Tell me who I am
My elusive self
No matter how hard I search
Still a mystery
Can they see in me
I wonder, my truest self
In ways I cannot
This year was a bit of a fucking mess, honestly. Important but painful lessons were had.
I want to write beyond my own head
I want to write The World Out There
All that comes out if I try
Is a tangled mess of shoelaces
Jumbled together trying to feed me a curb
A knotted mayhem trying everything they can
To break my teeth
I brave The World Out There to find
Snarled miniature tumbleweeds
Fighting to clog my windpipe
Dry and dusty threads trying so damn hard
To choke me to death
How do we describe an absent thing we’ve never fully touched
How do we uncover what will always be a mystery
How do we write what we don’t know
What we can’t know
December 27, 2024
I’m not much of a woman
Maybe I’m half of one
My body has the shape
We’ve largely agreed to call female
My chromosomes are oblique crosses
I’m seeing double
Am I missing half of my mind?
I play life defensively
Guarding what I must within reason
I take inside when I choose to
I bleed
But it feels like I missed something
When they were handing out
Club membership cards
Where’s the rest of me?
I check the F box on forms
With confidence
But at the same time
I feel like I’m sitting outside of it
Looking in
November 26, 2024
Today I look at my hands
My tiny, small, woman’s hands
And run fingertips over the
Small callouses beginning to form
The skin beginning to dry
And crack in places
And I feel happy
For everything I can do now
All these things that younger me
Wouldn’t even dream of
November 22, 2024
Finally, a few
Just a few
So little
But enough to find the shame
No matter how many poems
No matter how many tears
No matter how much catharsis
I’m still me
Exactly as I feared the most
November 15, 2024
For now, this place remains
Deep in my dreamscape
A fantasy to indulge…
How is it that the feelings of others
Usually so obscure
Can at times be so much clearer
So much sharper around the edges
Than what’s inside my own core…
I feel like there’s something I’m not willing to admit to myself
But I keep getting closer to uncovering it
I feel like I need to. It’s part of the process. But I’m afraid it’s going to hurt
Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s something, but not such a big deal. Maybe it’s not very painful at all. Maybe I’m overreacting to a minor discomfort. Maybe it’s something absolutely horrible, something I will hate myself for.