trying my hand at poety

Trigger warning: The last two verses (after the jump) mention the death/murder of people with disabilities. It's not explicit, I think. But everyone has their own comfort levels.

I am not invisible

I am not invisible

this may be obvious as I stand here

all 5'4" of me

feisty with anger

Or meek with the submission I learned to adopt

(and relearned with my disability)

"Invisible disability"

Invisible to whom?

I am not invisible to me

My forced breathing

my eyes clenched tight in pain

The tight way I hold my body to try to stop the waves

the twitches

the sometimes spasms

the way I can't move my head much

This is not invisible to me

It used to be that

the idea of disability didn't even cross my mind

Then

"my laziness"

"my weakness"

"my failures"

Were not invisible to me

Disableism was a word I might have heard one

let alone see it happening to me

(but hey,

what can I say -- even microsoft word doesn't think it's a word)

And then I tripped into disability theory

stumbled

a lucky stumble

It was clumsy

It was confusing

But it was a possible light

A possible community

A possible pride

(Although I was no where ready to even consider that yet)

"Someone, somewhere might

possibly

think i am.... disabled" I realized

Interesting

AMAZING

I kept reading

And suddenly I was angry

It made more and more sense

So very

fucking

angry

Because I'm forgotten

I'm 'invisible"

But it's not just me

It's like that "joke"

Which isn't a joke because it happens all the time

"I don't need to build a ramp for my store

there are no wheelchair users who ever come here"

Well how the fuck did you expect them to get in?!

I stood memorial for our dead last month

My dead

My community's dead

But no one had trained me how to mourn this

If we just forget, no one mourns

No one knows

know one knows how to mourn

Unsure what to do

What's the proper thing to do

to say

when "my" society hates people with disabilities so much that they are murdered

(c) Copyright (Also, this isn't a great poem, why would you steal it anyway?)