Clem Flowers

Clem Flowers (They/Them) is a poet, low rent aesthete, gorgeous monstrosity, the Aristocrat of Tenderness, and generally queer as hell AuDHD cryptid, with 8 chapbooks, a full length book of poetry,  Best of the Net & Pushcart nominations to their name. NB, pan, and living in a cozy apartment with their wonderful husband & sweet calico kitty out in a desert valley. Found on Twitter @clem_flowers & on Bluesky at clemflowers.bsky.social

Easy read of the poem in the images above:

Eta Carinae, NGC 1763, and all the stars and space between//how to make some sort of sense of yourself

“Some of our bodies are betraying us constantly. Would I have chosen this paper white, fur covered, constantly sweating body? No, I wouldn't have!” – Brennan Lee Mulligan

“The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.” – James Baldwin

CW: death, anxiety, disassociation, D.I.D., gender dysphoria, suicidal ideation, Cotard's syndrome 

contains quote from Dr. Sally Ride (1951 -2012, astronaut, physicist, and first American woman in space (third overall, behind 1st cosmonaut & Russian engineer Valentina Tereshkova (also still the only woman to fly solo in space) & 2nd cosmonaut & Russian aviator Svetlana Savitskaya (who was the first woman to perform a spacewalk.) Also cannot strongly enough praise all the good Dr. Ride did, especially as being the first known/ open LGBTQ astronaut.)

okay, so the whole bit of nebula that's, like, all these swirling wonderful beds of untold beauty and wonder just a vortex of majesty that would break out brains if we ever saw it at any time but operates at such a high level or like UV or whatever that our eyes aren't able to ---

wait, no, hold up

let me start over

so you ever feel like you're just some mech suit getting piloted by some funky alien who doesn't know really what they're doing and is just kind of winging it based off old sitcoms from the 90s and you never really feel 100% about anything at all and, like, that everything is wrong even when everyone tells you it's right and it feels like when you look in the mirror or see pictures of yourself you don't actually see your face you see, like, a hovering mass of TV snow right there and all the clothes you go shopping for and all the clothes you wear never feel right

right?

right

okay, so, turns out that's normal – well, not “normal” in the medical sense, but in the “there's way more people like you out there than movies and books and TV shows would like you to think it's all way more like a David Lynch project than you had been lead to believe and, like, it's –

yeah I mean there is gonna be those long dark nights of the soul where you're taking big swigs on a tallboy as you stumble around like a loon and wander thru the “historic district” of downtown and wonder how much you would have to let go off the gross heaving self that is yourself to let the rust or the kudzu or the desert take hold of you hard and just let this shaky wretched frame shuffle off to Buffalo as it were and just not exist not that you want to die per say (okay some nights it is like that but you'll eventually stop self-medicating and get actual professional help) but like you just want to no longer be a part of this plane of existence and then the beer is gone and you listen to the dull thud of bottle hitting inside dumpster and the moon has managed to peak thru the smog and light pollution and then all the noise all around all just sizzles away renders off like the fat on the steaks you're gonna go have to go cook in a few hours time on the graveyard shift at Denny's and you're just left looking up and off into the distance watching the shimmering heights and for a moment just not feeling so abandoned and lonesome out in the wide world

and then you learn about being trans
and then you meet a wonderful soul
and then you fall in love
and then you learn they too have been leading that mech suit life
and then you learn about them being trans
and you love them even more as they go on their journey to be who they were always meant to be 
and then you learn about “non-binary”
and they tell you how much they love you and give so much support as you go on your journey to be who you were always meant to be

and yes the world stays bad
and yes there is sorrow
and yes there is pain
and yes there is worry
and yes there is fire famine flood freezing
and yes there is pain
and yes there is sorrow

but
there is love
there is joy
there is flakes of light that pierce the endless shadows slow dancing into infinity

and so yeah maybe you are more a space cowboy in the Jamiroquai sense than the actual interstellar “The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter” sort of way and so yeah maybe all of this in the grand sort of you know cosmic entity that is the long stretch of time to us is like a cat toy to the universe and we're like smaller than the matted tufts of hemp that the cute kitty fangs attack so who are we to feel entitled to some grand sort of existential meaning in anything much less in what our bodies mean and stand for and so yeah so many people want you and yours dead dead dead dead dead head on pike to serve as an example dead dead dead

so that's why you keep on
so that's why you keep laughing
so that's why you keep going

when so many in so many parts of the world want you and those in your found or blood family absolutely extinguished like the killjoy who wants fireworks stopped and botanical gardens stamped out because they're pointless and different and don't make any money

when every day is a death wish

living is an act of defiance

you owe no one anything

save yourself – them, you owe
happiness