Last night–after months of intending to do so but not following through–I participated in Queer Bedtime Stories at my place of employment, Milk SF. It was my first time reading my poetry work in public/for an audience in perhaps a decade or more.
Frankly, the experience was transformative. I had forgotten the thrill of baring my heart in such a raw, intense way…and I could not have asked for a softer, more loving crowd with which to do so. It re-awakened something inside of me; hearing others read also stoked my own creative engine, and by the time I’d gotten home I was already incubating multiple new works.

I’ve come to realize this winter that (to borrow the language of Madonna) my heart has been frozen in many ways…because it has not been open. Those who’ve known me a long time have some idea of the hurts and betrayals of my past; through not just my parents but my prior love relationships. So many hurts, a death by a thousand cuts, had made me slowly close out the channels into my softest, squishiest inside pieces…the fertile depths of my soul in which poetry lives and grows. And if nothing could get in….nothing could get out.
I’ve spent so much of the last decade mourning the loss of some creative spark, when in fact it was I who slammed shit all the gates into my own Faerie realms, the home of true inspiration. “Who are you? What do you want, and why should I trust you?” These were the demands of my inner gatekeeper, yet even that shard of my ego had long since stopped listening to our believing those who stood at my gates.
It was this environment into which my future husband Andrew stepped; and though he revealed many surprise secret keys to do many inner doors, the deepest depths of my heart remained closed off to him; I realize this now. The truly mystical irony here is that it took him fulfilling my deepest fears–his unthinkable betrayal of my trust, shaking every foundation which I’d slowly been lulled into believing to be firm, stable, and sound–for me to realize the ways in which I’d never fully let him in. Stranger still, my desire for healing that which felt unforgivable proved to be the final piece of the puzzle: it cracked me open so wide that ultimately, the only solution became to stay vulnerable, to bare my heart.
I thought I could trust him more than anyone else; I discovered I could not. Paradoxically, the only logical conclusion became to try again anyway; after all, he is who I married, so it is a sacred compact that I should pick myself back up and go another round. Anyone can hurt me; most have. So why should this time, this person be the one who breaks me? I don’t just owe it to “us” to move past it. I owe it to myself not to give up on what my heart told me all along was a new opportunity for a deeper love, a higher love, a truer story. And we all know that there is no Happily Ever After in this reality; only new chapters.

So I’m turning a page. Welcome a new Satyricon to the stage. I am here, I am vulnerable, and I’m going to get hurt again.

And that isn’t going to stop me. Here is my heart.

Do with it what you will.