This weekend was already challenging and full of directional changes on a personal level, and then Orlando went and eclipsed everything. I haven’t stopped crying since it really hit me Sunday afternoon, so I wrote this fairly bad poem. I hope it helps, maybe, a little.
via ICFlorida
If you are reading this, please consider donating to the Pulse Victims’ GoFundMe, or donate your blood or your time or at least your psychic energy. This is such a massive loss — not just for Orlando or Florida or America or the LGBT community, but for us. People.
SIGNS
The sun’s been haloed
in clouds all day, looking poisonous.
I don’t know why I missed my flight,
I just did – pulled into and out of the airport
parking garage like water. I had a bad feeling,
so I skittered on home like a child. Sure enough,
my mom was sick again. After, I drove down
through the heart of Orlando, saw
all the signs still advertising
roller coaster rides, selling false fear
where so much real has been heaped, unasked-for.
Of course they’re still there, those signs.
But the small and ominous ones give it away:
the bright orange EXIT CLOSED
at Kaley, the digital billboard
whose dark cityscape and useless hashtag
are followed by a McDonald’s ad, as usual.
The disembodied voices
on the radio politicize, as if there’s any way
to make sense of it; anything to make sense of:
an anger big enough to blot out fifty lives –
more –
just out
to drink and dance and be themselves.
On Saturday night, I’d been dancing, too;
I woke up late in a lovers’ arms I’d been avoiding.
We fed each other roses, and although
we came home early, he said I would not wake
and held me for hours until my body let me out, to see.
Today, I make it through unscathed, so sunk in it
the flaming car on eastbound I4 barely even registers.
I climb the stairs to see the cockroaches whose bodies
disintegrate in the hallways where they lie,
because it is June in Florida and my apartment isn’t that nice.
I launder everything; I sweep behind the fridge.
I scrub and scrub but cannot get the sadness out.