#so i kept yapping using different metaphors and shit

[destielgaysex]

the physical therapist after listening to me describe my pain as a rock stuck in my neck instead of "dull" or "sharp" : okay... and on a scale of 1-10 how would you rate this pain?

my autistic ass who just described my muscle pain from a concussion with a metaphor: a 5 or maybe a 7... POINT FIVE.

the physical therapist: .....

[therumpus]

I. This doesn’t begin with the fire, but it’s as good a bookend as any— just one tableau of many featuring the usual cast of accusatory fingers and the figures in their line of ire. Those whom rules have favored and those who know what it is to suffer. We’d never been to that space, never met the artists and attendees who perished in a building like the wooden belly of a ship, but we know places like it, have danced and sung among fairy lights, handmade lofts, puppets built by da Vinci’s latest incarnation as a trans girl. Those people shouting shame over building codes have likely been the comfortable kind exercising freedom not to be spat on, threatened, killed for being observably at odds with the bodies they were given. Yes, I said those people, and I meant the enfranchised yapping like lapdogs from narrow confines, not the beings residing in rinky-dink bedrooms/garages that double as performance spaces for bands nowhere else will book. I’m a straight-seeming cis white girl learning to catalogue my privileges and extending them to others when I can and still I have been on the shitty side of a rental inquiry. I know how it feels to be, on paper, worth absolutely nothing and how easy to feel that way off of paper, too. II. I don’t get told to kill myself, but I know many in the LGBT community hear this regularly. Sometimes the command is convincing enough. Anger is a mirror and I don’t believe the otherwise-at-ease offended by some people’s existence are looking in it. I try to imagine having love and sympathy even for livid Jesus-freak gazillionaires stripping rights from everyone who can’t pay their way out of a bind and I can’t do it, can actually see my own humanity’s limits. Would that they too would try this exercise, or another: admit faults! Hard to trust anyone who has no sense of humor. A gentle soul who says she talks to angels has become someone I don’t recognize, taking to Facebook to slut-shame Beyoncé, tongue-lashing Obama for his immigrant sympathies, typing in vitriolic caps about all of the WHINERS who can’t accept Trump as a gift from the Lord. If he is a gift, it is a flaming column of shit wrapped in dubiously human skin, in my very un-angelic opinion. What’s absurd about the man is the obviousness of his insecurities— he doth protest too much—the kind of complex that might inspire sympathy were he not responsible for the lives and deaths of everyone within these borders and many beyond. An awareness of my faults makes me hesitant, makes me reach for the scaffolding of facts while his make him bombastic, loose-cannon, a smug, dumb charlatan, the emperor everyone knows is nude. The angel lady insists not all of God’s chosen ones were perfect. I’m a heathen by choice, prefer to direct my energies to stones, intentions, the wheel of the year. I like my lore more figurative. Still, something tells me God’s chosen weren’t hate-mongering gropers (or worse). Just a hunch. A woman’s intuition. Since childhood I have tried not to know anyone well enough to dislike them, or give them license to antagonize, but Facebook is the license now. We are all animals. At work I held and scanned sweat-stained armbands from the Holocaust, touching fabric that touched people condemned to death or to put them there: red and green triangles, Stars of David, angular S’s and skulls. This is not a metaphor. The rabbi-turned-collector I work for, who deals in Judaica, tells me something I’ve never known: shows me the band that says Jüdische Polizei, for Jews the Nazis forced to police their own people, a level of fucked-up I’d never read. Each day new 1930s and 40s equivalences grow more disturbing, like how fucking stupid and heartless are we, and what kills me is that it’s the red-blooded self-professed patriots only too happy to repeat history, likely the same people who look back at any clash and think they would have been hero underdogs, which is what all Americans fancy ourselves, right? My husband’s aunt is a troll. This is a metaphor. Says he doesn’t watch real news, directs him to YouTube conspiracy videos. These are our times: rhetoric trumps reason, is wielded like a weapon against “ignorance” by those who vilify book-learnin’. I know only too well that I don’t know everything, which makes me not want to claim expertise on anything, which is of course what I want from everyone else, the same control in different clothes. I know how to escape a dinner party mostly unscathed, how to be a worker about whom no one has license to complain, but I don’t know how to be a soul or what true goodness is. Sometimes when I am in a mood, it seems easiest to leave the earth plane altogether, let everyone else deal with this ever-intensifying mess because who am I to do it? I, riddled with faults! I, not very kind! When my serotonin levels are not set to self-destruct, I wonder how often Donald Trump thinks about offing himself and figure the answer is never. III. For the first time in three years, my husband and I were home in the U.S. for the fourth of July. We’d spent twelve months in a nation where kings own newspapers and teachers sign waivers saying they’ll never speak ill of their school, the king, or the country. Portraits of royals hang in every business and home. I watched from afar as my homeland grew foreign to me, an unfunny joke I didn’t bother to defend. At least U.S. journalism is real, I’d thought, an antidote to automatic support for all-powerful leaders. Sad! In Bhutan, foreign workers need government permission to leave town for the weekend, afternoon, even an hour. This is granted by the immigration office, assuming all goes well with a letter from one’s employer, the whims of government workers, and sometimes a whiskey bribe. We presented our papers at checkpoints and kept trips to a minimum, inconvenienced and suspect because foreign. For us, there was an endpoint to this suspicion. In our own country again, we sang “proud to be an American” with gusto, gallows humor. I didn’t yet think such a system could happen here, didn’t know that six months later I’d be shouting at the airport with hijabis and Jews holding signs saying “We’ve seen this before.” I can’t command and articulate encyclopedic knowledge on the history of anger in and toward and from the Middle East and everywhere else, which is what I feel I need every time anyone starts in against Islam, but it’s not like facts are doing too hot these days so what does it matter, why am I still trying to fight fair against people who make up the rules as they go, who pride themselves on never reading books, whose tones of voice call to mind a fat cartoon man tugging his suspenders with jazz hands, chewing one end of a cigar? Floating over my shoulders I’ve got on one side a stenographer and on the other a housecat, both judgey and withholding, not the spirits to summon in an argument against oversimplification, the casting of all of a kind of person as their worst representative—which is what U.S. Americans can anticipate now that the rest of the world sees us for what we’ve always denied that we are: buffoons, ill-meaning and otherwise. I don’t know what to do with myself so I am calling representatives, studying Spanish, reading the Quran before the Bible, wishing my boss Shabbat Shalom, trying out Insha’Allah, everything graceless as crayon art magneted to the fridge, but an alternative to withering. At the women’s march, where I didn’t march so much as shift my weight from side to side for hours, so crowded, all I did was look and listen to people who’ve done this before, their history of anger a resistance pre-dating my existence. I imagine the fire victims who might have marched with us against all manner of finger-pointing, their pockets perhaps like mine lined with stones: malachite for a resilient heart, sodalite for courage to speak truth, tiger’s eye for personal power. Among the signs about witches and coat hangers: Black lives matter. Can’t believe that statement is ever a provocation, but then what I cannot believe is redefined every time I read the news now. Home after the protest there’s a Facebook statement from the angel whisperer: “Congratulations, ladies. You just marched for terrorism.” A flame of anger. Then a video clip: someone just punched a Nazi in the face. 2017 battle cry as .gif. “We’ve seen this before” manifest as a fist. For a moment, that was all the clarity I needed.

RUMPUS ORIGINAL POETRY: “Mewl” by Sarah Lyn Rogers