thebubblemagician asked: Hi! I discovered your work through Spotify a couple years ago. I'm now I'm my third year of Animation in college and I'm currently working on a final project in which I'll be doing a "visual poetic." Your poems have inspired me and some have been very close to home so I was wondering if it would be okay to use an excerpt (and possibly your voice?) from one of your poems for my project. Thank you for your art <3
Hey there, first, I think what you’re planning to do sounds amazing! Unfortunately, I’m actually just a fan of Andrea’s. You can find them on tumblr at andrewgibby or on Facebook.
Good luck!
Your past so present you can feel your baby teeth
Andrea Gibson, “Angel of the Get-Through”
Your name is not a song you will sing under your breath.
Your pronouns haven’t even been invented yet.
Andrea Gibson, “Your Life”
I would be so goddamn sane.
My poems would be billboards.
Suburbia would be enough.
I would not have to gut myself
to find my spine crushed into powder
and brushed on her cheek bones.
My hair would not be a humming bird’s nest.
My mind would not have to move this fast
just to rest. — Andrea Gibson, Staircase (via weight-of-her)
Recently, when I wasn’t believing it, I said to somebody wise, “I deserve love”, and she said “deserve” is not the right word to use, she said love isn’t ever a thing anyone should have to earn, “and I mean anyone” she said, and I started to explain why I disagreed, but my explanation was a windowless room with a locked door, and I always, for as long as I can remember, have felt so much better outside.
Boomerang Valentine
I’m sitting on my friends’ couch several months into being intentionally single and celibate for the first time since I was 20 years old
20 years old: when I believed sex had to involve a dude and the word “screw”
I’m telling my friend about the psychic who said I’m going to meet the love of my life by the end of January
It’s January 10th and I’m so far from ready for cupid, that naked little shit, to fire anything sharp my way
So far from ready for that kind of insane only love makes me
My friend musters every bit of new age jargon she can fit into her tongue
and says, “What if you are the love of your life?”
I think, “Oh my god, I hope that’s not true, because I am absolutely not my type”
But, let’s say for a moment, I am
Let’s say I am my dream girl… And boy.
And I am standing on my front step
Ringing my own doorbell
Waiting for me to answer, so I can hand myself a mason jar full of water lilies I have rescued from a millionaire’s Monet
Let’s say, I am so charmed by the radiance of my own anarchy I invite myself in for tea
And when I’m not looking, I sneak the steam from the kettle into my pocket, so that the next time I am missing the coast of Maine, I can gift myself the fog
Let’s say I’m not just running my mouth around an old cliché that says we gotta love ourselves; we don’t
I know that I can keep getting down on myself ‘til I’m tucked into the grave
Looking up at my name, carved into stone, wondering why I never knew I’d been cast the lead in my own life
Y'all, when it comes to love, the only thing I’m certain of is you are the best thing that has ever happened to you..
Whoever you are-
You’re a quitter? Great, there is plenty worth quitting
A sore loser? Who isn’t?
You got no discipline? Maybe discipline is for body builders and closeted gay monks
Picture a magician so attached to being perfect that he cuts off his own legs just to pull off the trick
Picture the 738 selfies I deleted before I took one that I was willing to show to the world
Picture me wishing I could have all of them back
My so called “flaws” in stacks, like baseball cards I know will be worth something someday
Like, compassion
Like, tenderness
Like, my capacity to think myself a catch just because I have never seen a chandler I didn’t want to swing from
because I would maybe go to space just to know if railroad tracks look like zippers from the moon
On days I have hard time keeping warm in my own weather- I imagine what the first flower said to the first human, trying to name half its flower petals “love me not’s”
No
that is not how anything grows
Of all the violence I have known in my life, I have not known violence like the way I have spoken to myself
And I have seen almost everyone around me hold that same belt to their own backs
Then, looking for someone outside of themselves to come clean that treason up
If I were to ask myself out of that cycle, I might say, Listen,
I am still going through a growth spurt.
I am still yet to get my worst tattoo
I am still clearing the smoke from burning the toast I wrote for my own wedding day
I am still trying to get rid of my mirror face
Look myself, dead in the eye
I know Facebook is a lousy mortician,
desperately trying to make us all look more alive
I know there are things I haven’t survived
I know there are people in this world who have had to work really hard to survive
Me, I don’t ever want to take that lightly.
But, I want the heavy to anchor me brave
to anchor me loving
to anchor me in something that will absolutely hold me to my word
When I tell cupid I intend to keep walking out to the tip of his arrow
To bend it back towards myself
To aim for my goodness; until the muscle in my chest tears from the stretching of becoming
When I came here to be a lover of whatever got covered up by the airbrush
The truth of me: That beauty of a beast
Chewing through the leash
'Til I get a mason jar full of water lilies
I got a kettle full of sea
And my whole life, y'all, my whole life is just a boomerang valentine; coming right back at me
POST-ELECTION THOUGHTS/FEELINGS
It’s three days after the election and the grief is still thick in my chest. In one moment I’m imagining the apocalypse, people burning flags to heat their homes. In another I’m imagining those red stripes cut down the arms of kids desperate for a pain they can control. At the airport in North Carolina I can’t keep myself from crying in the restroom. At my gate a sweet stranger leans in to wish me love during this awful time, and just as I begin to feel hopeful my phone flashes an image of four women wearing shirts that read “Make America White Again”…then another image of a man wearing a shirt that reads “Black Guns Matter”…then a moment later my friend texts to tell me she’s getting married next week, before marriage is no longer legal, before god is hate’s puppet.
I was a patriotic kid. I cried during the national anthem. In elementary school I loved US history. “The land that abolished slavery!” “The land where the natives were so happy to have us they cooked us thanksgiving dinner!” “The land where a woman could become president!” My first girlfriend tattooed the word “UNLEARN” in huge letters across the back of her neck, but this election day still speckled my timeline with celebrations at Susan B. Anthony’s grave, and I didn’t know if the people who posted knew or didn’t know that Susan B. Anthony was racist, notorious for saying, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”
I felt some of what I’m feeling now 12 years ago, a shock riddled despair at the announcement of Bush’s second term, while my girlfriend, a Latina woman, was shocked by my shock. It takes a ton of privilege to be surprised by racism. And yet here I’ve been these past days, having to remind myself it’s not a nightmare.
Just a week ago I was driving through rural Maine, where every yard and car was plastered with a trump sign and I thought, “My god, if I lived here I’d think he was actually going to win.” I didn’t think he was going to win, and I didn’t work hard enough because of that. For three days everything in me has been screaming “blame yourself” but blame tends to be a lazy beast, so I’ve been working to unpack my blame into whatever I can mobilize. Anger I can mobilize. Grief I can mobilize. Fear I can mobilize. I have a friend who spent a year washing the blistered feet of people crossing the Mexican boarder into the Arizona dessert. I have another friend who spent two years living in a tent, chaining herself to the gates of a nuclear weapons facility. There is so much to do it’s impossible to have a heart and not find something, quickly. I pray each of us will find something quickly. I pray we are good to ourselves and each other through that work.
We wear our traumas
the way the guillotine
wears gravity.
Our lovers’ necks
are so soft.
(via nickifm)
When I come home, to sit still, to chop carrots, to call my mother while I make soup, to sweep the porch, to walk barefoot through the creek, to fall asleep in my own bed while the city is still awake, to lower my voice, all the way back to the earth, to remember a story I don’t want to forget, the couple who flew from Croatia to put a thimble in my hand, with my grandmother watching, I rest it beside the others, on the windowsill, beside the bookcase, full of books my friends have written, I have a bookcase full of books my friends have written, that is so much, that is so much.
(via bacon-and-beer)