It started as an Instagram post, a story I wrote on November 26th.
It’s some kind of whiplash to have to go on about life as normal when absolutely nothing is normal. Extreme violence around the globe, mass death, mass murder, mass poverty, mass climate events… and holiday sales and promoting friends’ makers markets and events at the bookstore and trying to write my memoir and trying to build relationships and heal myself and figuring out how to love and be loved and how to be soft so I don’t shatter from being too hard…
My life feels so insignificant in the face of… everything… and yet it feels more significant than ever to connect and love and make art and find joy while my heart is screaming in grief… holding all this in tension.
I suppose it really started before that, on October 7th. Or even before that, as I taught incarcerated students, or watched wildfires burn around the world, or read about rising ocean temperatures, and whales and dolphins beaching themselves in mass suicide events.
But after my post on November 26th, I started writing this poem, and finished it yesterday. It still doesn’t feel complete, but perhaps that’s because I’m still grappling with the concept of existing, of this state of being that requires us to go forward as if life is normal, when it isn’t.
“Ontological Whiplash”
Images shift between bombings and
Selfies, between decimated cities and
Holiday sales, between dead children and
Beach vacations between propaganda and truth
Between suffering and extravagance
It’s a world of extremes, or at least that’s what it seems
So many are oblivious and I often feel delirious
As I go about my day
Producing content for work
Heart-reacting friends’ successes
Collecting memes and pictures
Sharing them like a crow gifting trinkets
I attempt to make art
I love, I try to heal and
try to let myself be loved
I pull another card from the deck
to see what I’m dealt, this time around and
My heart screams grief
My heart bubbles joy
Walls rise up around me to keep the pain away
Walls stifle the joy so I take them down
Exposing the raw wound
How do I stay soft so that I don’t shatter?
I want to feel the pain of olive trees, burned,
Of homes bulldozed,
Of land desecrated and children taken.
Scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and I’m being a witness, right?
I’m being a witness while my heart numbs,
I’m being a witness while it all becomes
All too familiar
A wellness page tells me to take care of myself,
That loving myself is resistance,
That raising the vibration of myself
Will raise the vibration of the world.
Don’t feel that grief, don’t stay in it:
Grief will only call more grief.
The world you think about is the world you create
So don’t think about anything that hurts.
But we can’t love and light our way out of this one
So I’ll be screaming and laughing and crying and raging and loving
I’ll feel it all even if I shatter like glass after my body is jerked back
in the whiplash of feeling it all.
In the whiplash of being human in a world
Where we call everyone “monster” as soon as they don’t serve us.
In the whiplash of being human in a world
Where everything human is pressed out of us
In the whiplash of being human
When being human seems so insignificant
In the whiplash of being human
When “human” can be redefined at any moment
When “human” can exclude you if you’re
Not profitable
if your land is wanted
If your culture is maligned
If you don’t fit the imperial agenda.
When “human” can exclude you
If you’re the wrong skin tone
If your body isn’t able
If your love isn’t straight
If your prayers aren’t to crosses
The ontological whiplash of “human”
When the word is a weapon
When the withdrawal of the word is a curse
When the word “inhuman” means nothing other than
“Not like the powerful.”
When governments decide who is human
And can steal land,
Corral people in cages and pens
And reservations and separate states
When humans can decide their wants
Overrule the needs of every living being
When governments no longer care for life
Perhaps being “inhuman” is really what we should try to be
Ink and Vein 