Sleep of Waking
I tire of sleeping
And yet all around are the somnolent
The unconscious
The dreaming
The listless and stirring
The moaning and the gentle
humping the pillow
weeping into sheets
drunken vaporizing, trying to pickle
The peppers that are a bit too hot
A little too raw, A thimble too … alive.
I know not how to sleep, nor how to stir the waking,
Nor how to wake the sleeping,
Only to endure, to strive, and to remain
Wisdom is everyone, when alone, and by circumstance, silent.
For there is no one with whom to share a revelation
To make the possible real
Only the Constance
Of the ever more, Inevitable sleep.
The Family Circle
My body is occupied
An apartheid of hungry, inconsiderate children, eating and starving and unheedful of words
Crawling all over me, eating and drinking their fill, having their way
Consuming me
Utterly
They leave so little of me
So less than needed for fuel
For life
For hope
These consuming children crawl upon and devour me.
Mommy
Mommy
Mommy
Mommy
Stop crying.
Mother is dead.
My Blind Sisters
Do not hear, do not speak
They feel their way, they touch
But tentatively
They avoid hands but seek walls
Of firmest stone and most reliable accuracy
And other raw and bleeding lies
They do not wish to know they are lies
They wish only for your continued
Silence
Dead man, dead man, Not a lot to see
A not quite transparent barrier
but inside bone and dust and teeth
Consequence, ends, a burning ashen breeze
I want to leave more than you,
More than teeth, debt, and grief
Family Is grief, murder, and destiny;
Family is prison
Family is the thing you cannot escape
The curse that does not die the line that does not end
Tired of your Middle Class White Agony,
Be free motherfucker, be free
Be Free Like Me
Out and proud
Be poor like me
Out and proud
No agency
Out and proud
Stand alone
Out and proud
What gives, hello?
All of the new closets should forever be
On fire lit with shame You see
a million faggots – out and proud
died in your name
like Christ, martyred,
Defamed
Dead just … dead
so, you could stay
Wrapped up snug.
Danger far away.
Hid in your privilege
Secure in your sin
All of you
Cowards, like Him
The terror of
The slow inevitability of death
Is exceeded only
By the much slower inevitability of life
It’s inexorable certainties
It’s caste system of circumstance
It’s preordained dooms
It’s altogether awful outcomes
A forgone farce,
at a slow glacial pace
The gentle walk of murder
The silent amble of inevitability before death
Spin me on the wheel and gamble me
Any other outcome would seem as free
A thought, in the key of uncertainty.
Keymaster
They will never know what it means
To be a child in a cage.
A chicken in a coop
A dog in shelter
Even if you make the save
Get free
You will always see
The bars
Forever barring you
From the outside.
Pressed to the glass
Biting the wire
Afraid to touch the
plastic surroundings
Fear and
Confinement
And bottomless
Liquid wells of
Rage
Later still, later echoes
Little welts, cage
Fear, come find me
Thoracic scathers on my wall
Phantom
Hiding the pyre
Inside
Leaves turn to ash
Turnkey turn your hand in me
Turn the key until I see
The Girl Who Was A Knife
I must have murder in my nature
For all the women I know wish to kill me
And the Men I attract I want more
I know what they want
Needing Seething
Angry.
Crawling Creeping Arresting
Anger
The arresting anger officer
The arresting cancer worker,
Anger like cancer, all-consuming grabbing for a body to
Infect
Monetize
metastasize on
into and out of
my inner most
They want to touch me,
put their hands on
Sliding in
Searching rummaging
for a flashpoint
Me
Exploding white hot
In me
Again, and again the thrusting knife
The arresting type
Infect, insect
I know what they want
But I am not their Sacrifice,
And These are not their Chains
But I see
I too
Anger
I am a knife I cannot be held
Festering, blossoming full and green within me, thorns around my heart, erupting from my crown,
Wine of Anger and contempt blooming green within me,
bursting from my skin like chlorophyll.
chartreuse Clearasil
Pollinating all the air around me with oily filth and rage
I cannot be their human sacrifice for I am already my own.
Sharpening my own pantyhose
On flesh and bone
Grinding and bowing a saw boning
I am a knife I cannot be held
Reap these green killing fields,
For you shall not rape this one.
See saw sing song
How often were you caged as a child? By whom? How many times?
Did they say it was for your own good?
Did they throw things at you?
How did it make you feel when they said it was good for you?
Final Survey
First cage
No, let’s talk about the second one. 2525 Trinity Mills Rd.
I’d rather do another stint in county thanks.
When you place a child in a cage
Some part of them remains there
Behind bars
Forever
Trapped behind rooting walls
You cannot see
Unable to touch or be seen
Come see! Exhort the bizarre and cross yourself
Because you are not them.
Rubberneckers notwithstanding
Always looking, gaping, fearing, but never seeing, nor feeling.
Future Blue State Superstars, rubberneckers on parade
It took my third, most literal cage, to realize that there was something wrong
Their lies
Their clean sciences
Theories and protocols and other vain strutting bird man things
Preening like a flamingo
Cold noodle reptile scales
Soul tea of cockroaches
There’s something wicked ironic about
Texas Cheerleader Chick
Beating the child up with her
Rolled up copy of
Texas Monthly
Very Urban Cowboy
Very….oh whatever it is you hollow people do
When you are not hollowing and filling
Little ones like gas stations full of
Invasive tropical insects,
Devouring their insides and creaking on
Our bones in one song. A death song.
Buzzing insect legs against shallow hollow bones
I know your systems how you change things
With my last breath you cannot have her
But she’s already yours.
Washing away down to the sea
No justice, no consequences, but business is doing just fine.
Margins
I’ll look at it later
When did you tell me that?
You never said that
You should write more
why don’t you contribute more?
but what do you do all the time?
If you weren’t so difficult
Why must you be so confrontational?
That’s not very feminine
Quit being so emotional
Aren’t you a bit old too…?
Aren’t you a bit young too…?
Aren’t you a bit fat too…?
oh.
Oh.
Oh, you’[re one of those.
Silhouettes, footfalls,
Echoes but never seen
A way out can be found
But not heard
See and feel your
Way through this cacophony
Do it alone
You can’t do it alone
Keep trying
Maybe you’ll succeed
By luck, but not by love.
Say it again, take three.
The dead are with me today, en force
I feel they are watching me,
Which fills me with the tremendous
Anxiety that nothing I do will be the right thing
Will be good enough
With the dead watching I fear and breed expectations of failure
Perhaps because they are the dead
Confuses me about what need be said
Free the Beat
Do you believe in ghosts she said
No
I don’t believe in the dead
The dead are dead
They don’t exist anymore
They are ash turning to gooey liquid slime.
Bag in a box
Item number 111,429
Dead is gone forever. Quickly forgotten
The best
can be for hoped
Is to leave a beautiful stain where your heart and mind decayed.
I don’t believe in the dead
But I want to
Though I fear their judgement
I ever feel their eyes,
Watching me,
Even though I
Do not believe
But that’s because you see
I’m crazy
The destruction in my head will take
Any voice
Wear any face
Anyone’s identity
If it will help to tear
Me
Down
Bag in a box
Item number 323,513
Leave a beautiful stain, girl and please
Remember me
Proud scared lost little boys
Well aren’t you special
Mr. All White Thing
All of the benefits
Of civilization you bring
Steel bats, barbed wire, and AR-15s
soda pop, teeth that rot, the right wing
Antivaxxer Aryan nation
That’s not what that word means
Go ahead numbnuts and scream Wolverines
Who are these angry little boys?
Who wave their guns as toys?
They suck their guns as though mom was one
But die quickly alone in the dark
Lord of the flies, lord of the flies
Clutch pearls be king of the hill
With bodies that fill
The holy till of all who look different or ill.
A quaint new world order,
Us v. 12 year old murder dorks
Such boys most often
get annoyed at having to see
The results of their own inadequacies
Played out before us
all to see. But make way,
Get set, Up next, the drone war
Turn the machines on the people galore
Clone drones, on your knees, drone clones, rubber and bleach, stains and teeth,
Bashing their skulls until No one else is left, it’s Droids verses debt
The end
WORDS
Words are blades
Sawing back and forth
Swinging wings over the clinging crevice
An electric abyss
What does a girl do
When you know you are
Alive
Squeezing your gifts all over the scene
Never quite fully but mighty obscene
Squandering your gifts, dipping your hips in liquid slips of gazes and wonder
A bath of hopes and dreams and other squiggly crawling things
Always your eyes on me
But in a dream
In a dream
Entering
Inner means
And slicing the seams to reach the stream and drink of screams
And prepressed, repressed teens
Daily Prayer & Malediction
Goddess lead us beyond temptation
Goddess lead us into Depravity
Goddess lead us into Sin
Goddess lead us into Lust
Goddess remind us that we are Animals
Ouroboros
True wisdom requires
You shed the skin of thought
And first become a beast
And return
If you would become a god
I am Her morning star
I am her profane and her light
Blasphemies & xenoglossia
I am Goddess, bow down and worship my flesh, divine in its soft curves, complete in its transformation, its elevation, its ascension.
Zero
Empty, I contain.
I consume,
myself.
I am Her vessel,
Honor the Goddess by Profaning Me
Worship ME by bowing down before Me and place thy hands on me and profane me most utterly
In your rough grasp I ascend
In
I am void
Holes
Sucking in the light
Hungry as life
Lay your hands upon me
Put your sin into me
Deposit your profanities in me,
Let me Be Your light
Drowning in
My
Darkness
Why I am not a “quiet girl”
Tilt your face upward
Raise your voice into the light
And Shout
Shout to be heard
Shout for your life
Shout for all that has come before
Shout for those who cannot shout
Sisters and brothers and cousins, everywhere
Shout for all those for whom shouting means death
Shout and remain undiminished
Shout until you shatter mountains
It has been a very long, very hard road to get to where I am now. For a long time maintaining my mental health required a constancy and discipline guiding an archology-like self-exploration. An intense but slow process of uncovering and correcting. Slow. Torturous.
And some days it still is. Some days the inner tides demand despair. This I have come to accept as part of things.
The best thing I ever did, or one of them at any rate, was to stop being afraid of being “crazy.” To stop “fearing the crazy bitch” as I once thought it. To accept all of “that part” of me, to let it…be. AS I learned early in my life as an out transgender woman, and before that as an out queer person (In Texas in the early 90s at that) respectability politics are always there to control, gag, and silence dissenting viewpoints and shame those who espouse them. and sometimes yes even I who hate and wage verbal war on such social ills as that, internalize it all the same. Sometimes to a GREAT extent. To those of us with a neurodiverse nature or with deep trauma in our juvenile years (or both!) it can be far worse.
So to stop fighting that part of myself that I have inexplicably waged war on for most of my life and call a truce and say “Hey sister, we’re on the same side.”
That’s a fucking massive and radical transformation. That’s like the end of the cold war. And it was like the last puzzle piece snapped fully in place and for maybe once ever I could see the whole picture. I could appreciate all of me in my serendipitous complexity and weirdness in total probably for the first real time in my life.
To accept that part of me.
Let me correct, to accept me.
Another lesson I had to learn, you cannot slut shame someone who is not ashamed of being a slut. The truth of this wisdom holds true here as well. Confronting that stigma – any stigma – is hard but necessary work. Hard but even so, that much more rewarding to feel yourself escape and break it’s bounds.
A transformation as profound as my second chrysalis, when I started HRT in my 30s, and as intense. I feel like some strange new lifeform unleashed on the world, fully aware of her strengths and limitations and all the ways in which she is both alien and familiar to this place. Perhaps not coincidentally, I feel the presence of something greater than myself moving with me, is this religion (or just creeping senility) I wonder?
Now, unlike before, I go out of my way to turn over all of the old stones in my mind-garden, seeking to find fears and confront, shatter, and harvest more of myself from them. With every step I take into this labyrinthine garden fear shatters and I am reborn, the second coming of a trembling innocent goddess, wide eyed, but with wisdom.
She will not be tricked again.
Do not believe their lies – there is revolution in a single touch, and world sweeping moments in small acts of compassion.
Twist into a widening, spiraling gyre and dance with me, in fire, love, laughter, and blood there is birth and new stars, come and see.
Gwendolyn Harper (She/hers) is a queer trans artist, model, sex worker and writer who scribbles about politics, gender, the future, science fiction, psychology, horror, games, queer stuff, and kink. She lives in northern Washington state with her two husbands and an abundance of plausible deniability.
Proudly feminist, proudly pro-sex worker, let the third wave be a tsunami.
Space is the answer. Gender is stupid. Sex is good for you.
Be a good person
Be joyous
Crush your enemies
All else is details
Madwomen in the Attic 
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