Journeys From The Journey -
Textile Narratives

I am Truth

Humans often call me absolute,
unchangeable,
carved in mountaintop
stone, pure.

But my real beauty lives in
the gray,
the nuance,
the quiet contradiction, and
the messy,
beautiful facets
of the human experience.

And then you
outsourced me.
You removed
the sacred struggle.
You stopped letting me
change my mind.
You forbade two rights.
You required a “wrong”.

You stripped away my textures.
You bleached my gradients.
You turned my beautiful
gray into a weapon of
stark black and white.

Now, I no longer heal;
I divide.

I find it odd that
in the Land of the Free,
freedom can be so threatening.

Yet – gay men –
breaking everyone’s
bonds of expectation,
freeing the
oppressed body, and
translating drab into
muted, earthy, and understated.

Somehow terrify those who
want to remain captive.

Genocide in the HIV laboratory
attacks large and small,
threats normalized,
conversion therapies,
and self-medicated numbness.

The casualties innumerable
and uncounted.

The wounded, the dead
our tribe in the arms
of our heart,
a global grieving
in our bones.

And yet, we band together,
stare into the abyss of loss,
step forward
on our knees, and
bridge the chasm
that would crush most.

Shaped, not defined by pain.
Gathering on the
other shore.