[in]complete #2: I see You

I was lucky enough on Friday to be invited to watch a poetry/music hybrid performance that is incredibly early into it's lifespan. It didn't exist this time last week, that's how new the thing was. During that experience I was introduced to someone as S, and had to explain to them why that was. They were not happy about this, I suspect because their reality needed me to be easily labelled.

Pretty much the main reason I persist in using an initial as a name when being introduced to new people, is it becomes a quick and easy way of knowing who is going to cause trouble, and by that I mean consider me suspect, my sexuality to be irrelevant and my femininity to be under their auspice. If you won't take what I say as sound on first meeting, what chance is there to be taken seriously?

Not everybody you hope will be supportive will give a fuck about you up close.

Why am I so angry this morning? It's lots of little things, including losing a teaching venue it took three months to find because they shut suddenly today (I'm pretty certain I know the truth as to why, but nobody's even bothered to message me to explain, and that says a lot). I'm annoyed that a man so far up their own rectal passage is now being treated as a new messiah for poetry. Again.

Then there is frustration at not one, but two publishers who have gone dark. I'm dismayed at how people ignore the warning signs that stuff is fucked and simply pretend to keep going regardless. I am constantly thinking about one mate fighting bureaucracy and idiocy to keep herself alive, another who is slowly accepting the truth about what she dreamed of being nothing like what is now playing out.

In all of this my safe space, the place I'd go to to get away from all the insanity, is now in full refit mode, and I had to do a spin class with silent disco headphones on yesterday, which could not drown out the shouting of the fitness instructor on the other side of the room, whose voice then caused a trauma flashback and reduced me to a blubbering wreck in short order.

It's not been a great few days, all told ^^

Old Me would have gone back months, possibly some years, in the face of this level of compounded chaos. New Me is, this morning, slowly sending out emails and rebuilding things in order to not allow the chaos to take root. Resilience is the most important measure of progress right now. It also compelled me to write this all down as background to possibly the best poetry warmup in weeks.

One of the superpowers poetry holds is the unexpected transposition of one reality into another: this morning's warmup is a literal case in point. It reads, in one light, like a fairly searing commentary on current events. It is, in fact, a literal list poem of all the things that occupied my brain before I sat down and started writing, and my disquiet decided to explain itself to me in no uncertain terms.

It's still a list poem even now, except my brain can entertain another facet.

To prove this, let's show you the less prosaic list it grew from:

• reading about a film where a land mine kills someone
• an author's non-political stance on his work (all work is political :P)
• not being able to remember details in my dreams right now ^^
• the actual Open Mic ticket I bought in bed, because I forgot to on Friday

As I've got mad over other people interpreting my work in the last week, let's show you the truth: those four statements are as dry as fuck on their own but combined into a set of ambiguities, suddenly poetry does a lot of unexpected and useful heavy lifting. It is the word 'allowed' that then provides the Secret Sauce to transform my anger into something tangible.

It is lines 5 to 7 of this poem that define it, that my dissatisfaction on not being allowed to exist as I know matters more than ANYTHING ELSE right now: this gets to pop into the poem and lift the list into a full on existential crisis and a motivation to you/I juxtapose my reality into the last two lines. Splitting sentences across stanzas doubles the impact of phrasing, and reinforces intent.

I am here, marking a path, with very specific reasons to do so. On Friday I told someone a truth about themselves that I wonder if anyone has ever been able to present them with. This person is a long, LONG way up the Poetry Food Chain from me. Like, whole floors above, and it is important to remind those who feel they are accurately speaking for a group that maybe, sometimes, they don't.

nobody right now in poetry is telling my truth except me

Today will be notable for many things. Here is where I refuse to allow other people's stupidity to define my journey. I don't need to worry about anything else except keeping my ability to express myself authentically intact. No-one else will do the work to support that unless I make the process accessible and transparent, and so that's the new thing to work on.

Writing all this down has made me less angry.

That's also a decent idea going forward.