in this uber eats city all we got is prayers to pay rent. & tarot cards for queers kicked out of their family home with nowhere to go. & Youtube meditation music. & virtual cacao ceremonies. the cost of living is more than the cost of submitting my gay poems. so I guess I’ll poet another day and pretend I’m surviving. no, I’m too tired to cook again. but it is what it is, isn’t it? some gays seem to fight each other on who is more broken and I keep not winning. so find me in the swamp. I’ll just reed and rot and pause all of this while you all keep hustling and hustling and hustling and hustling and hustling. all of us trying to cancel eachother to get on top. artist friends brag on instagram and I keep scrolling until it’s my turn to brag. Some of us are honey howlers, generation cycle disruptors, violence caller-outers, community optimists, cryptic queers, magic mystics–but me? I’m tired. all my exes in the city look at me with glazed eyes. they try to door dash me. everyone seems hungry, but I’m not sure for what. I keep poeming for something to change but I’m pretty sure one of you hexed me. they/thems ask me if I’m ready to give up my poetry dreams and hunker down in an office where they’re legally required to memorize my pronouns and compliment my socks. I say no because the city seems to be protesting against my life, again, and I guess poetry is survival again, and I guess I return the word as my faith again, and I guess I have these poems to armor me when money and housing and jobs and security all fail, and at least I got poems and magic, and meanness, and grit, and animal hair, and divinity, and rawness, and realness, and roaring and thunder and tremor and testosterone and maybe one day that will pay me enough to live here but for now I’ll eat on borrowed time and fam I will feast I will feast I will feast