Disabled Storytelling
from the archives of past self, written 8.18.23.
I write poems, complete them, and still often do not fully understand the entire energetic offering of what I wrote until years later. What a gift is it to see my art from an evolved perspective each time.
This poem, Disabled Storytelling, was written in the most excruciating grief, post-psychiatric incarceration, while I was unhoused, and placed into a group home. I had a notebook, I had some markers, and so I wrote things down that came to me.
Disabled Storytelling
I am disabled as in I am living, breathing.
I will not memorize
my poems, I will read
from a source & recite them with meaning,
An excruciating or sometimes peace-fulfilling
intention
my mind can become
distorted from who grounds it.
I have been separated from
my
mind
often.
When I was off the meds
I am shapeshifting,
gravity could never know me.
I would rather be
in sound with knowing,
I am disabled as in I am living, breathing.
And yes,
I appear to be standing.
If I was prompted,
"tell your story,"
I could only respond
with my words cross-legged
preferably alleviated
on comfy sofa, my body
decorated in regular cotton,
medicine readily
available to me soft
enough to remind me,
I would not cry
to you, my story would not make
sense even to me if I tried
to tell you.
Because my memory defies
what you'd need to hear to know
you don't want a story.
I am disabled as in I am living, breathing.
no system in place who
would not traumatize me, maybe others
who were
restrained, neglected, dissected, injected,
those whose memories are also somehow fleeting.
I am disabled as in I am living, breathing.
And my poems are my story, disabled storytelling too.I am calling into existence that my story is known by the ones that need to.
Often the best part of my madness is trusting that things do not have to make sense. So, thank you for reading my liberation from the logical.