I’ve been contemplating whether I should create a trigger warning or an age restriction on this blog. I’m writing about violence alongside sex, intermixed with evocations of sensuality, suicide, rape, emotional abuse, love, anxiety, and gender dysphoria. So far I’ve done so through poetry and abstraction, which is healing for me. I’m developing a use of language or a poetic system where I can excavate my own memories, articulate the interdependent relationship between the sacred and profane acts that become fused together in intimate violence, and trace out my own biography as queer transman and radical lesbian feminist, whose emotional life has been shaped by sexual abuse and trauma.

But what about you, my dear reader? The random wordpress user who follows a tag, or a friend interested in my poetry or in my process may not be prepared for what they find here. I don’t know where this blog will go: Nowhere? Nowhere I could ever imagine.

Poetry is a like a Rorschach, in that you will see in it what you bring to it. But the mirror I provide is not smooth, flat or clear. It is riddled with scratches, distortions, and jagged edges. What it may show you is not random. It could cut you in places you are not yet prepared to heal. I see this peril in my attempts to express my feelings and experiences with trusted loved ones. As much as they may love me, we end up in conflict, alienated. I trigger their vulnerabilities and anxieties as I expose mine. I defensively cover up my insecurities as they challenge my assumptions. I cower as they push back against my own projections on them. Tell me, won’t you, if it makes you feel? Tell me, won’t you, if you understand? They grow silent, weary. I retreat into poetry.

I posted a poem today that is self-censored and I’m not comfortable with it. I am uneasy about tagging, password protecting, or otherwise filtering out the most difficult pieces and emotions because as a writer, it is about integration, fusion, and visibility of what has been hidden, suppressed, and silenced. The dashes are my compromise, as was a revision from c-ck to d-ck in the fourth line below:

I’m the best at collapsing make room for your insatiable

I don’t need fuck
you myself

big dick little d’clit always a girl

show me your t-ts
whore
hide your c-ck
monster

Its the compromise to keep the sacred and profane in the same space without excising what is difficult and ugly and to address my concern about how algorithms will rip these words out of the context of the poem, of my biography, and of a poetics statement such as this one. The meaning is chopped up and processed back through the binaries and associations I’m working to fuse and decouple. But get this. My anonymous readers are filtering in from three places consistently: self-help, Christian evangelist, pornographers. Did I ever mention I grew up Baptist in puritan New England? Its peculiar nexus of guilt/shame/sex must show.