And Counting

I was westbound on Denver's 16th street mall bus last Friday, ready to meet a friend for some adult beverages.  The bus approached market street's transit station and on my right a small-but-mighty gathering of Denverites was stirring, listening to a mo-hawked woman with a megaphone. All the ingredients were there: picket signs, strange but still charming looking punks-my-age, and a smattering of Denver metro police, so I got off early.  The first sign to become legibile through the shuffling on the bus and the crowd outside read, "your homophobia will be the death of me."  The second declared, "there were no suicides, just murders."  I'd only stood there a moment, wishing I had a better camera phone when someone blasted into a whistle and the 60 or so listeners hit the deck.  On the ground they froze.  People whom I suppose were organizers made their way person to person with a bit of chalk and traced each silouhette onto the concrete.  They were a garden of 187s. I half expected some passerby to come up behind me, curious, and disappointedly mutter, "god protests are gay."  

I'd stumbled across a flashmob born on facebook.  But instead of off the cuff Blackeyed Peas or a fist-pumping Journey rendition, they were there to recognize a war on certain personhoods, to proclaim that when we trade 'nigger' for 'faggot' and tout our progress, we deceive ourselves something terrible.  Five deaths in three weeks, has been the headline, five gay individuals so crushed by the weight of their tormentors that no future peace was worth enduring the now.

Oh Poet

oh poet,
lost and wandering in memory wild,
bring me the truths we stored in your pockets.
surely they're worn now,
chipped and flaking slowly through the forests you tread.
but take one out will you, crush it up and blow it to the wind,
and wish it find me soon.

Old Souls Walking

so we were in Ashley's apartment,
sitting on the floor with dim lights and cheap wine,
and Colin and I had taken to a conversation on the sophisticiation
of human consciousness over the many periods of time.

I watched my brother take elements from the ether,
handfulls from the invisible kitchens of self,
with which he began to kneed this conceptual dough.