But I am divided. In a way that is hard to shape into words.
For women who love women are often the rarest night birds.
Theirs is a love that does not come easily and for this reason, it takes a great deal to stay
Sure and certain on the rainbow path.
Sometimes I understand my bisexual sisters, who having had their love affair with the curves and softness of a woman
Return to their husbands in droves or pick out that wedding dress and let the man
carry them over the threshold.
For a woman to be loved by a woman may feel natural but many times it is a struggle
we have no rule book, we may both want to have the other carry us or hold us when
fear besets
and men are so good at being heroes
and women are taught to be saved and rescued.
I understand then, the desire for a woman and the longing for less strife
where if you have children it is sometimes impossible to find a way to describe
why you leave daddy for a second mommy and how
fractures in emotions are not easily translated for young minds.
Had I children, who is to say I would have been brave enough? Equally it is part why
I never did.
My sacrifice came because I saw no other way
for it was never as it felt in the arms of someone of the same gender
and in that I am unusual and possibly 1 or 2 percent of the entire world
though it will seem more during Gay Pride and other events
where everyone holds a rainbow and joins in.
Only the days when we are not celebrating, we may be struggling
to fit in with even each other, strange as we may be, these women who
in various guise and costume
fall in love with other women.
I don’t get on well I admit, with those who believe the only true lesbian
is one who shaves her head and dons mens clothes.
It is not that I cannot see their point, or how many years before
it may have been the only choice
but I did not fight this hard to dress as a man and love a woman
who is also dressed as a man.
I would rather pick a full cheeked feminine boy with long hair
and pretend he had nothing between his legs than sell out my own idea
that love of a woman is as feminine as it gets
and we shall share each others’ dresses.
Our history has been unkind and as such, we do not trust very easily
if at all and when we do, we are liable to judge or leave out and exclude many of our tribe
just as women have done for millennia in their pursuit of men
hated other women for existing and challenging that thin mesh of safety.
It saddens me then, to be ostracized when I walk into a gay bar
and do not fit in, or feel judged by my sisters whom I want to
take into my arms and feel less lonely by.
This is but one aspect of the kalidoscope of being the L in the LGBTQ and
few of your G’s and B’s and T’s and Q’s will rush to your defense
we are co-opted in a group who really knows little of the other
for we are as disparate and different as it gets and often we walk
alone, despite our legal rights and our social acceptance (some of the time).
Alone because we cannot befriend a straight woman for she may
wonder if we would fall in love with her (and quite possibly might)
nor a gay woman for her girlfriend will begrudge us, nor a gay man
as they have often hated women and especially those who forsake
men, there is nothing in common there, and straight men will
try to tell us we just need a good f**king and we’ll soon change our
ways so who is left? In the great wide world to be close to and share?
Those fears and our desires, the very stories of our lives
for whom 98 percent of the world cares not, they have their
1.5 children and ideas of normalcy and we don’t fit well enough.
Sometimes, how much I want to tell someone
of the love I have for a woman and the stillness of night
when we move together and how I catch my breath as
she turns like a thimble in my hands, silver against moonlight.
So quiet instead we are, often falling in love and unable
to share this or speak of it, for it is forbidden. No one will
listen, or be interested, they do not understand our strange ways.
Still in this day and this time we are shadows within
light and light within shadows picking our way through
mostly eaten strawberry fields, dreaming of a girl
who may like ourselves be wandering, looking for
a girl like herself who has only ever wanted to be
held tightly and hear the slow beat of a girls heart feel
the rise and fall of her soft breasts and know
she is where she belongs and needed every bit
as much as her own thirsty heart longs
in the early hours and late at night like the lonely
wolf who by himself will climb to highest point
in futile search of another’s call.
I didn’t have time to un-knot my hair or brush it down
Where are you now?
I grew up fetishizing