National Day of Silence, 2004.

Long Sleeves

I decided, if there was a silence
To be broken today,
It wasn't the silence I've spoken,
Or unspoken. It wasn't the silence
I've borne on my tongue,
But worn on my arms.
Today, I am unarmed. [remove sleeves]
There are many forms of silence.
And the form I've worn
Is the silence of long sleeves.
My silence is long sleeves.

And I wore long sleeves today
Just like every other day—
Because that's what Day of Silence is
To too many of us:
Just like every other day—
Muffling what's just beneath the cuff,
What my cuff's just enough to cover.
Some silence is words unsaid,
But most silence is the silence
Of what there are no words for,
What I only found blades for,
Shades of red I've bled pages for.

Most people who cut
Can't say exactly why they do it,
And neither can I.
But it's got something to do
With being broken inside,
A kind of broken that comes from
Being unspoken. These cuts
Run from the inside out—
That's what bleeding is about.
This is the pain I can't contain,
Be it chemical deficiencies in my brain,
Who defines what is sane and insane,
Or unsanitary. Some would say
Inflammatory — a sinful violation
Of the skin God created me in,
to part my own Red Sea.

See, a razor
is just one manifestation
Of an iron curtain,
A mechanism of repression,
A literalization of the saturation
Point of self-hatred (hate red),
Overwhelming depression
Unhelmed onto the skin,
Your darkest realms
Tallied, divvied up by the slice,
So that the darkness, the pain
Becomes as real
As those cuts beneath your cuffs
That'll take weeks to heal.

My silence is long sleeves.
And I'm not saying that I cut because I'm queer,
But it doesn't help.
And I'm not saying that I cut because
I've been disowned by my own
Queer community,
My own LGBT-CRC,
But it doesn't help.
I'm not saying it's because
My parents divorced,
Or because I've been abused,
Or because I raised my brother myself,
Or because my dad's an alcoholic,
Or because my mother tried to kill herself,
Or because I was genetically programmed
and then socialized to self-desctruct,
But it doesn't help.

Or maybe there is no such thing
As silence. Maybe there is only
What you do not hear.
I keep it hidden
A month at a time—
Despite a roommate,
Despite communal showers,
Despite the balmy weather.
This kid who loved the ocean
Hasn't been swimming in a year.
The key to my secrecy
Is simply that people don't see
What they don't want to see.
People just don't see
My silence is long sleeves.

So I don't bare my arms publicly
For the first time today
Because I want attention or intervention
Or pity. I just want you to see
That self-harm is a cause for alarm
In queer youth communities.
I want you to see a silence
That is real and is physical
And is deadly, inscribing itself
On queer bodies. My body,
My silence, wears long sleeves.

There is nothing innocent
About blue and pink;
Gender runs deeper into the flesh
Than most people think.
Gender is intersex infants
Having their genitalia sliced;
It's imprecise bulimia and
Drastic urgency for plastic surgery;
It's fifteen-year-old boys abusing steroids
Just trying to get buff enough—
to rebuff the tombstone truths
Of internalization. There are
Three groups of youth in this nation
Four times as likely to attempt
Self-harm, then self-annihilation,
And that's the queers and the trans
And the Native Americans.
So if you're queer and Native,
May you live to honor yourself
As an endangered species
That survived.

It's said we wear our hearts
on our sleeves.
But if you've caught my drift,
You'll remember it's at the wrist
That the nurse finds you pulsing.
So, no, again, I don't want your
Attention, intervention, pity.
I just want you to look
Beneath the sleeves
To the heartbeat
Of this queer youth community;
I want you to help me
Keep that community pulsing healthily,
To fight a systemic self-harm epidemic—
So that some day there might not need to be
So many others like me,
So that the next generation,
So that their bodies, their silence
Will never wear long sleeves.