Untitled (a poem)

This week instead of a blog I decided to write a poem. Inspired by the last 2 weekends of staying in bed reading Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's work (Care Work and The Future is Disabled) I decide that the best way to process the feelings I am working through is through something I often default to when I have feels - verse. 

I have a list of words, sentences pouring over this page

    written in bed, typed at a desk, the marker of where serious things happen

        are you serious?

They are mostly questions, like Jeopardy, my answer to this feeling is more questions

        who am I sharing space with? 

            And why have you not allowed me to see that? And why do you not know that for a lot of folk that unknown creates an intense amount of anxiety?

How?

How did you underestimate so greatly, the expectations for this event, for people who are looking for hope, for people who want others to notice, to witness, their reality?

How did you not give room for grief space? Why did this not have space to reinforce the sense of urgency?

only branded space, institutionally curated space, questions left off, because this is a money space, not a people space, and certainly not a disabled people space. 

        excuse me sir, this is a Wendy's 

Which I guess is why we can't do this work here, or the work that one can do will always

    already

be 

   one of erasure

Traces of care erased in question and answer tabs

Traces of care erased on Twitter threads

Traces of care and identity erased in EDI (erase disabled identity) 

Building possibilities and futures are impossible when others actively rewrite the past for you, and harmfully curate the present

the material aspects of so much lost in these spaces

that refuse to acknowledge the sensory, that privilege the visual or the aural, as though everyone can engage in all those ways in exactly the same NT ways, in the exactly the same institutionally mandated frameworks (ironically mandate from the Latin literally meaning "to give one's hand"  when there so much lack of touch here)

responsibility to others, lost, in responsibility to costs 

how art is so crucial to social justice work, but this was not a space for art, only empty rhetoric

    but this was volunteer work, we volunteered to help put this harmspace together

We volunteered as tribute, as voluntcapitalism, a line on a CV, a title, an excuse to not be held accountable for this        because we volunteered

I prefer craptions to CART because CART is too slow...as I prefer craptions to CART using access friction to support budget restrictions

    We need to talk about older white queer women and how time as moved on but they have not (thoughts for another time, another duree)

Because living as care, living in care, is having a person's face appear in your mind as you are reading, putting the book down to ask, hey how's your ankle today?, hey how's your kid? hey how are you really? hi, I hope you are safe from the wind. Hi, did you have some soup today?

I remember you, you are important to me, thank you for the message, sorry for the delay

That is care, that is what care space can look like, it does not have to be toxic positivity, or yoga at lunchtime

I feel seemingly punished for how I necessarily tune out whenever I hear the word joy - as I cannot remember my last joy, as I have lost friends since I was young because of my inability to "find the joy" as people die and get sick. 

I live in the overlap of care spaces, like the intersection in set theory, yet this also means that I feel both everywhere and nowhere  - and I know some of you feel this same way

    left thinking just why    why

why my coffee refuses to stay warm, as my heart boils over