Mansplain

Does the old man at the counter tell you to “smile sweetheart” as he pours your accomplishments into beautiful bowed boxes? Do the group of guys on the street heckle and low whistle as you walk by? Did that guy on the train..the stranger you have never met, try to tell you how you need to, are supposed to, should absolutely be doing this that and the other to run your life in a successful way?
Then congratulations, you’ve just been demoralized, hypersexualized, and disregarded for your gender. What fun! 

Oh What fun it can be to attend a business conference as an equal, only to be spoken to as a child. The subtle art of mansplaining really knows know limits. There are few experiences more rewarding than being in the same business school as the other assholes in the room, getting better grades and larger accolades the entire time but still being mistaken for the coffee girl. What a special joy to be invited to an awards ceremony honoring YOU and YOUR business, accompanied by your husband; only for everyone in the room to congratulate HIM on how much effort this must have all taken to achieve so much. 
Then congratulations, you’ve just been demoralized, hypersexualized, and disregarded for your gender. What fun! 

Have you been in situations where your breast size is valued more than your IQ? where old white men decide the fate of your body, and assault goes hand in hand with the dress you decided to wear that day? 
Then congratulations, you’ve just been demoralized, hypersexualized, and disregarded for your gender. What fun! 

Slut shamed, cocks teased, egos bruised, divine feminine destroyed.  Broken hymen’s, hypocritical sermons, men in power, women in kitchens. Barefoot, pregnant, broken, bruised, underdeveloped, over exaggerate your tales of sexual prowess so that we KNOW that when you give it to us, that it’s good..it’s so so so so good and she loves it. She loves it..She loves it!!!!!!!! SHE LOVES IT!!!! YES! 
Congratulations, you’ve just been demoralized, hypersexualized, and disregarded for your gender. What fun! 

Are you so filled with rage and fire and fierceness that it’s sweeping from your pores and burns in your belly too bright where a small hiccup produces a fire fountain like a dragon that’s been caged for a century? Let it all fucking burn. Burn bright. Burn it down. Let the flames consume them all. All of them. And remember: Insecure, upper class republican white males burn the brightest! 
Fury. Fury. Fury. Rage and murder. 
Congratulations, you’ve just been demoralized, hypersexualized, and disregarded for your gender. What fun! 

No I don’t want to date you, I wouldn’t even let you work for me. Yes, i made more in an hour than you made in a month. Please put that cock away or PLEASE let someone mistake it for a hitchhikers thumb to hail me a taxi out of this nightmare. I am not here to please you, suck you, Fuck you, or be nice to you. I am not at the club for your pleasure or your entertainment of which these things you are neither. And No, you cannot buy me a Drink. 
Save your drink. 
I’ll take the money instead. 
Oh and congratulations, you’ve just been demoralized, hypersexualized, and disregarded for your gender. What fun! 

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I don't think I could have gotten any bigger.  My round glorious belly almost always in my hands.  I loved being two people.  I learned how to skateboard that summer.  I wanted to show him I could be daring, exciting, fun.  I would tether to his bike and hold the rope through the city on her section 8 long board, weaving in and out of traffic in my pink mini skirt.  The orchids don't seem to mind the heat, neither do the bananas.  The one day it rained in the past two months was on my son's birthday.  We had an outdoor party in the rain and it was nice. it rained hard for a few minutes right before he started to crown.  Tina said it was babies blessing.  I believe it.  He survived.  He survived my body. He survived my mind.  I hope he can survive my traumas.  I hope I can.  I fell down hard on my board.  The day I decided to go down a grassy hill  - I stopped to think half way down and that's when I ate shit. My mind is constant in its betrayal.  I wanted him to stop me, to tell me it was a bad idea.  He was on his phone,  checking on the girl echo had just had his abortion.  My knee still throbs from the incision, from the uncertainty, all the instability.  I'm hard to deal with.  He tries,  but I think he'd rather not have to.  He wants simple and easy. I am neither of those things.  When I relax and trust,  I end up in a bronco passed out while the driver and his friend smoke meth the whole way back to the city in the middle of the night.  He doesn't do anything.  He just lets it happen.  We survived, I should be grateful.  I knew he loved me when my belly was full of him. Note the love feels obligatory.  Not simple.  Not easy.  That's not my lineage. My son changed me. Changed his own future.  He was born with a mouth full of shit and still survived.  He's forging his own path and I'm blessed as witness.  I stayed naked in the summer heat with my baby on my deflated belly for our first 40 days.  I sat by the fire and recounted the moments of his birth with him on my lap as he rounded his 7th cycle around the sun.  I feel his spirit in the wind on my face through my hair and past my skirt.  We all survive. 

I sit on the old stained blue and white checkered couch in the Italian boys’s living room. Virginia sits next to me with her back against one of its arms smoking a cigarette, she extends her legs  onto my lap. Her short dark hair frames her face and as she gestures and talks, ash from her cigarette lands into her lap and the seat of the couch. It's hot. Its always so hot here in August. And still. No wind at all. Like the entire city took a deep inhalation in July and never bothered to exhale. The house plants are crispy brown and the the dirt from the pots spill onto the carpet surrounding them...covering the walls with chunks of drying earth and dust where they were knocked over and righted but the contents were never replaced. 
The entire room is dusty and in the rare corner where sun is permitted to shine you can see discarded paper clips, candy wrappers and clumps of white fur from Bobbys cat. 
Outside its that twilight hour and we haven’t turned the lights on yet, so the overall effect of the room is more romantic than macabre in the dim light. 

I'm perched on the very edge of the couch trying to touch as little of myself onto its surface in my backless yellow sun dress. Beads of sweat form at the nape of my platinum blonde ponytail and begin to drip drip drip down my naked spine one vertebra at a time. My black mary Janes are nestled on the purple shag carpet in front of me where the coffee table sits. The glass coffee table is covered in tiny particles of weed, strips of rolling paper and small rolled up pieces of cardboard filters. Bobby is across from me hunched over the table on the yellow and red plaid couch. He’s wearing his long sleeve flannel shirt and his long brown hair hangs limp and stringy around his face. Held tight in both hands and working fast is his red weed grinder with the sex wax sticker on it. On the glass table in front of him lie the perfect filter and rolling paper combo designed to create a blunt worthy of the gods. On either side of him sit his two nameless and comatose friends..casualties of the first round of Bobby’s craftsmanship. Im realizing that this “epic party” Virginia invited me to is just a way for her to not have to come here to get high alone. Just then the doorbell rings and team plaid couch perks up. The coke is here. We need to leave.

I landed in a perfect storm in the middle of a rainbow field when I was the color of static snow.  Of course my color is static snow.  I took the risk in order to gain the advantage. And sometimes that means showing up like that in a place like this. Where the building blocks are thoughts run a muck and there's nowhere to go but up, and then down,  so much further down.  All the way to and through the ground. 
I swear I was up above it all. The depth surrounds and consumes the ones who got sucked in. In got sucked in. Fast.  I liked it. Shaking, shivering as the land pulsed beneath my receiving body of water. Fingertips write fire songs on my soul,  my soul quenches the thirst of the brush, strokes waiting to deliver craved balance. Catches light flowing down yellow rivers that carry energy back to the banks of rainbow fields, dissolves the static flow and fills in the spaces  - pillars sprout up and grow out into magnificent reflections of their creator, rewriting old stories in orange paint like it was the first time.  
The secret language of bubbles dances on the tongues entwined in that familiar celebration of color. Nothing makes sense taken out of context and the circles straighten me out,  just like they always have. And maybe I'm all messed up. Went left instead of right.  Then straight back to the center guided by the white arrows that know just how to bring me back- back to the front.  Back to the moment.  Back to the heartbeat beat beat. Shaken back to life. And then up up and away. The stories cross the help the suns set a hundred times in a hundred unknown ways.  These bits of land catch my feet walking in the directions of the medicine that carries and holds me.
The end of Sumer brightens the canvas,  making way for the fall of change to ignite the webs of creation... leaving behind the marks of renewal. The truth resides there, at the bottom of everything, above and below the layers upon layers of imagining, realizing and standing perfect and still in the middle of his rainbow field.