Not My Body

 I don't post poetry often, because I do not write it. However, tonight as I type this I am feeling a certain way that I must share. If not to get it off my chest then to to at least kindle a spirit who may be feeling the same and needing to know that someone else out there also feels this way. I also guess it's not really poetry? It's more of just emptying myself of something so that I can free up space for something else.

No matter how I dress,

Or the scent I mist upon my body.

Every time I look in the mirror,

I see him, not her.

I want to be her.

I want to let her free.

I want to be that woman I dream of 

Every.

Night.

I don't know what Deity,

Or what unfortunate science, 

decided it was okay to create me in this world,

In a body I cannot call my own.

In a shell that I had no control over.

I don't know whose idea it was to play this cruel joke.

To hand me the short straws of life.

Why was it so funny to hand me happiness,

but to serve it with a side of poison?

Every.

Time.

Stuck in a body not of my own making,

Not of my own choosing.

It frustrates me so, that I'll never look like 

the greats.

I'm talking, the powerful cis black women that raised me.

A body snatched for the Gods!

A body that would make a man need a chiropractor

because he keeps breaking his neck trying to catch all my angles.

A home body I can call my own.

That is not limited because I still have male presenting parts.

I never wanted this limitation to being.

I want to lay up in the sun breasts out and shaking them because they're mine, 

and they're lovely.

I've always wanted to be a picture of feminine beauty and grace.

A sister, physically.

Not just mentally and emotionally.

No matter how many times I close my eyes

and

Open them.

No matter how many prayers I whisper to the heavens above.

Still I wake in this unwanted frame.

Still I persist just out of reach from the form I want to attain.

Still I cry every night thinking one day my love will reach 

his limit and have no more grace to give

because life has taught me that 

What I see in the mirror will always be true and it will never change.

But,

I still look into that mirror and imagine that one day,

that woman who has fought so hard

to even stand here

WILL

be staring back at me with a smile.

No longer colored with that poison life tries so hard to 

force feed us.

Maybe one day soon.

Until then I live in

Not My Body.