See Reverse Side for Poems
You are 50% cotton, 50% spandex. You are a size small. You are made in Bangladesh. You are made in Taiwan. You are a cool iron after wash (if needed). Tell me what are your ingredients? Sum yourself up for me in three words or less, ridiculous?
Straight Edge kids preach and sell drugs. Christian kids preach and then fuck. Queer kids preach and discriminate against their own. Republicans wear Democratic underwear. Everyone’s grasping for labels like air-needing to preach to belong. Searching to live with tags at the back of our necks like size 8 Hanes, only wash with like colors. It’s that simple, we all have a tag and just flip it- see reverse side for care. Now I know just how to treat you. Now I know who to be for you Organic fiber blend, cotton-polyester friend.
Tags just fade after hundreds of washes. Twice a week Tide, Downey and bleach and before long the words are washed down the holes of the washing machine barrel. It all turns blank. Then we have to start from the beginning, naked and begging for a tag to wear. Vegetarians preach and sneak hot wings at midnight. Feminists call each other bitch. The sun rises and the moon forgets to set and there’s a contradiction- an apparent apparition in the sky. There’s only so long a person can live two lives before both appear in the same lie.
Preach hard or go home, join our club or live alone, sign here…it’s your contract for friends-break it and it’s the end. Become a hasbian an ex-vegetarian, a born again virgin, a drunk with edge tattoos. I’ve been a jock, a Mormon, a Born Again, a slam poet, a lesbian, a drug addict and back again. All just part of my equation.
I rip all the labels off my t-shirts now. I am whatever I am in the moment that I am in…that’s all I can promise. To be Suzy La Follette with tagless t-shirts. But I am more than just that. I am my name and all the empty spaces in between, all the dark secrets that no one sees.
There just isn’t enough room on a little white tag. It would take pages of healthy forest to touch the smallest part of us. So, stop writing labels and start writing poems. They won’t spend time bleeding their ink into the barrel of your washing machine.
We, as human beings are forever transforming constantly cacooning pieces of our souls and freeing them. Our poems are written on the backs of butterfly wings fluttering so rapidly that our definitions of self are always morphing. Could you imagine: “Hey man, I thought you were like some cool caterpillar but your really just a wimpy butterfly, whoa, lame.” No, bro, yesterday you just saw a piece of me that underwent a transformation of time. Every day goes by and I am writing new poems on the backs of butterflies. Stand back friend and allow me some cacooning room. You think I’m different now, give me a week. Your label won’t last that long under the bleach of misunderstanding. I thought you were…I thought she was like…I thought he was a…butterfly and caterpiller wrestling each other, perfectly polishing this art of living.
There are a million souls co-existing in every human core all attemptimg butterfly status. There’s just so much a person must experience before cocoons may be shed. Imagine a human at the point of enlightenment a million different butterflies. Their wings covering the sky, blocking out the sun. Wings fluttering in unison. Butterfly markings form poems flying across the sky describing this enlightened one. Then, we could all read a poem of humanity. See poems for care. See people for who they truly are.
You are 85% truth, 15% hope. You are 90% future and 10% history. You are 60% love and 40% doubt. But we all are 100% people.
See poems for care.