Falling Rockets
James Whistler, 1875

we are falling
where
the world
wants us,
rising up in smoke
and raining down
in flames.

 we are rockets
when
we want
the world
to rupture
to release
to open up
its pain.

This is the world where we wait to watch the sky swallow us whole and we are not afraid. We watch it collapse with wonder and welcome stars with outstretched arms as the night envelops us in a crashing, fiery embrace. We are still here, we are home, ready to re-build and re-make.

Himininn er að hrynja, en stjörnurnar fara þér vel.

This is so contrived.
I’ve lost my intent.
I’m fading.
What is this?
Let it consume me:

Seek sadness when life doles it out.
Submit to the cynical resignation:
Eat or be eaten, ruin or be ruined.

I point at the darkness and say look at the pain.
Pain that cannot be shared through injury,
pain that cannot be shared through empathy:
here, and here, and here.

Behold in anger and agony
the eagerness of the world
to throw piles of shit on us,
the extras to the everyday transactions
of heteronormative capitalism.

EVERYONE IS WELCOME (but)
you have to be the right kind of queer.
The “LGBT perspective,”
a banner, some glitter, an alcohol ad.
An assimilation that is
forever over the rainbow.
Your recognition,
Your visibility,
Your safety:
Precariously conditional.

You fail at being us.
You fail at being you.
It’s always a zero-sum game.

You could take off the blindfold and say:
“I think this game is stupid and I’m not
playing it anymore.”
But hitting the wall or tearing off the blindfold
is as much a part of the game as
pinning the tail on the donkey.

What is the alternative?
What could we angle ourselves toward instead?
Openness?
Is that good enough?
Strong enough?

I feel failure vibrate along my spine.
I open it up, it says:
Keep going, you’re almost there.
Always almost, but never quite. . .
What?

That.
A constant questioning.
Questioning as ritual.
Questioning as exploration
rather than a search for certainty.

Question, release, rupture.
Open and let things fall apart.
This is not despair,
these are the preferences of the universe itself:
Verbs over nouns.
Actions over states.
Struggle over hope.

What am I waiting for?
Just as little is seen in pure light
as in pure darkness.
I pick up my belongings
and move them somewhere else.
Just like that.
Here and then there.

My bones begin to fill with words. . .
A future in the present emerges.
A temporal contradiction,
the outposts of a new society.

What is it that has led me away from the present,
to another place and time?
How is that I have arrived here or there?

This is a room of symbols and I have found my place within.
I am within and have not learned to be two places at once.
I focus without instead of within and remember:
Love never comes home until fear is far gone,
but there is nothing left to be afraid of.

I wake up every morning
Re arrange and re member aim . . .
I am
We are:
Coughing up the universe’s distortions.

We can feel our queerness as the warm
illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.
Don’t we hold our ground wonderfully?
Will we ever choose to hold the sky?
We stand beneath it and wait for it to crack.
So when it does, the light of the world pours down and
fills our empty hands.

Himininn er að hrynja, en stjörnurnar fara þér vel.
(The sky may be falling, but the stars look good on you.)

 

 

Composed with texts from: Ólafur Arnalds, Sara Ahmed, Maggie Nelson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Miranda Mellis, Gabriel García Márquez, José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, Ursula K. Le Guin, Saul Williams