Seedlings of delight stem in the growing branches of his curiosity.

His eyes carefully trace the edges of the world,

Stenciling out the beaming rays of sunshine

that seem to shine out of everything he claims

with his inquiry.

He finds no remorse in wielding a lightsaber to class

and battling the Jedi and Sith

of a kindergarten education,

Nor is he yet poisoned by the constant eyes of society

Programming their codes of self-worth and constructed identity

into his DNA,

Leaving craters of silence and submission in its victims.

So he triumphs through the playground

Holding the hand of his first girlfriend,

Ignoring the ridicule of foreshadowed impositions

So that he can show her the swings and slides of his imagination.

 

But he later discovers, when he quits playing sports and begins being called gay,

That sticks and stones may break our bones

But words can staple themselves

onto the documents of our memory,

And broken bones may be repaired

but memories stay locked up

in the storage of forever,

Waiting to be blackmailed

so that we can sabotage ourselves.

 

So he is recruited into societal design,

Tranquilizing his emotions so that he can

numb the sensitivity he feels that

only girls are allowed to experience.

He finds himself in an anti-pink regime,

Waging war on the girls and banishing

any boy that comes into contact or even

thinks about the exclusive girl color.

One day his friend commits treason and he

runs away from him, avoiding his friend’s cursed

disease until his friend breaks down and cries.

He then sees the devastation of misunderstanding.

 

So he finds himself embattled in trenches of contradictions,

Seeking sanctuary from the magnetism of conformity

And conflicted over revealing ostracized differences.

There is no middle ground in this war,

Neutrality would only result in his excommunication.

Two roads diverged but he chose the path of acquiescence

until one day he discovers that the

people he stripped his identity for to mirror theirs’

were not actually laughing with him, but at him.

 

The conflict with his identity

Is written in the textbooks of masculine and feminine distinction.

Roots can be traced deep in the soil of his family dynamic.

Women are predominantly present in his life

and the majority of his identity is sculpted

under the guidance of his mom.

So watching the Notebook around an army of

crying women didn’t make emotions and their

consequences that foreign of a concept.

But the parameters of the sexes define that he

must camouflage his love for romance and

suppress sensation, substituting his

armament of tears with a football.

He accepted that as reality,

 

And then,

Then he realizes.

He realizes that he is different.

And that different doesn’t mean bad.

That different doesn’t mean you wake up on a

sunny morning and have to stay in bed all day

because the neighborhood children won’t

recognize and accept your alien features.

And it is in that moment,

That he accepts himself.

 

In the fifth grade he conceives a proclamation

Constituting his new identity.

He learns that you don’t have to be cool to be cool

And that nice guys may finish last

But since when was happiness a race?

He no longer hides his rebellion against the “player” guy label and

his wanting to only love one girl and

to be a father and give his wife all his happiness

and raise his children with all his love.

He no longer takes shame in caressing

the beauty and tenderness of all living entities

with ever so delicate, consistent sensitivity.

He proudly claims his ability to

be sensitive, to feel, to be human.

He no longer has to clone pictures of

others over his face to look

in the mirror and see acceptance.

 

But now that his audacious cry for revolution

Has asserted his sovereign possession of his own soul,

What now shall society identify him as?

Certainly the malicious barrage of being called gay

for five straight years doesn’t qualify him to be a “he”

Certainly the stretch marks on his thighs, the boobs he grew up high, and his weight and hips getting wide from the medications he now takes cuz he almost took his life

could qualify him as a “she”

Certainly the fact that he wasn’t “man” enough to deal

with hopeless tears and morbid fears and

tried to take his life which he no longer considered dear

couldn’t qualify him as a human being

Certainly,

Certainly.

But maybe I am just “me.”

Maybe just “me” is all I certainly need

for my soul and identity to be free.