incubation?
I sat, lay, barely did
bent over while
they stuffed me full of--
all hopped up on—
now
that’s
over.
Lil chickadee,
Now fullgrown fowl.
Sauna—
hot yoga—
toxins excreted daily.
I like to think:
along with trace metals
I might have imbibed from
the tap,
bits of experimental
robot-makers
that I was told I needed and
couldn’t exist without,
also
bleed out through the skin,
until nothing but me—
bull-headed,
lion-hearted,
living,
free—
is left.
I like to think that.
So i
think it.
During that
incubation,
I assumed the opposite gender,
traditionally speaking,
in some ways:
I bought things—big things—
things girls wait to buy with husbands
or when a relative dies—
and built things with my two hands,
and watched from an emotional distance;
(I realize these are
generalizations,
but—society!
I cannot help but entertain,
at times,
the stereotypes!)
The gender swap, subconscious,
internal,
prepared me
to associate once again
with the opposite gender
and recall aspects of femininity
traditionally speaking;
if I knew it for myself
then I could empathize,
and I did, and it has worked.
Come to find
the “opposite" gender
is more my same
than most I’ve met
who share my gender:
most.
Time passed,
atypical influences
fell away,
and the pressure
to be someone
they could tolerate—
just to get through
a day
(what do you call that?
survival. it was never dishonest.)—
fell away just the same,
thanks to age, maturity,
change
awareness of
my worth...
All hopped up.
All still. All quiet.
Voice reaching out now.
Willed it that way.
Won’t waste time
if you choose deaf ears
(it’s not fair to the deaf!).
Not open
to anything but warmth now
anyway.
And this is private—
but I’ve had some wine.
I wrote most of it drunk,
all hopped up,
and like Hemingway says to do,
I edited sober.
Education suggests
I keep it to myself,
but my heart has
not yet been streamlined,
and so
wants to share it.
((Oh, hell,
the fuck’s the big deal anyway?
It was, ironically,
"women’s college"
that taught me
to embrace p a r a n o i a
about g e n d e r
and s e x u a l i t y.
Oh, good job
that roughly $160k
and countless hours of sleep lost
did me!)
In Ernest, (ha!)
I will try in the future
not to ever follow
a dead alcoholic's advice
on when’s a
good time to drink!
. . . . . .
© erika s. haines 2014
