Mentor

Coe is overall an exceptionally open-minded and supportive college campus. I will never discount that fact. However, this is not to say that heterosexism, transphobia, sexism, and peer-induced depression doesn't occur. A gay male student was forced to drop out a year ago due to an overwhelming amount of entirely unprompted harassment on the basis of his openly-stated sexuality. A friend of mine heard his ex-boyfriend's last moments before he killed himself last semester. Several transgender students "hate on" our Coe (LGBT) Alliance on the basis that the organization dismisses the "T." Three separate first-years have approached me because they were facing immense emotional difficulty due to their own sexuality or due to an LGBT-related tragedy that has occurred to them or someone they love.

For these reasons, some other LGBT students and I have begun collaborating with our campus's Diversity Committee chair to form an LGBT peer-mentorship program on campus, a small group of students/upperclassmen who are seen as individuals rather than as a group like Coe Alliance. We're organizing an open panel that will hopefully bring attention to us as a unique separate group of individuals looking to help.

In short, I'm sick of the taboo that exists over mental health and LGBT-related struggles even within the LGBT community itself. Not everyone needs to come to Alliance. Not everyone needs to have these "gay" discussions I have daily with my friends and fellow LGBT-identifying students. And not everyone has to be LGBTQetc. to suffer emotionally in these respects. A straight, white male, just an hour ago, approached me to tell me he was having a tough time, and I want to help this person through this week, through next week, and through any other emotional adversity that arises. And there is nothing I am doing right now that I wouldn't put down in a second to go speak with someone or help someone who is struggling in any of these respects right now.

Of course, as anyone who's spent even an hour with me knows, I'm a sarcastic, overall cynical-sounding person. People have said I'm not approachable or that I'm intimidating, but the simple fact is that, as of this moment: I'm here to help those who want it and those who I can help. And there are others around(six people I could name right now) who are just as much "here to help," and between us all--through this new peer-mentorship program--I believe we, as a set of individuals rather than as a group, can help any struggling LGBTQetc(or straight) person on campus.

Yet I'm left with a series of make-or-break questions:
Does my sarcastic personality relay the message to others that I'm cynical and not actually supportive? Does this mentorship program's affiliation with Coe College staff mean that a student is going to be more likely to dismiss it as too official? Would a struggling student rather talk to someone they perceive simply as another student? Will I personally be able to help anyone? Will this program further perpetuate the idea that LGBT people need help? Am I making a bigger deal about all this than I should be? When does this schpeal become just another example of my pretentiousness?

Possibility and Hope

While I was opening my latest work in progress, I accidentally clicked on "Poetry" instead of "Fiction" in my Documents folder. I've written two poems in the past year—I don't claim to be any kind of capable or aspiring poet; just a reader—so many of the titles I saw under the file were much older, most from high school. One of the poems I saw was "Her Crystal Reckoning," a poem that I spent eight months working on during my senior year. As someone who often looks for reasons to think even more highly of himself than he already does(Take this sarcastically if you want to. Or don't.), I felt obligated to see if I was as a prestigious a poet as I thought I was at the time.

 

Some of the first thoughts to enter my mind:

"My god, I was pretentious?" "It reads like someone who's only ever read Poe and Milton." "What did I think I was going to do with this?" "No eighteen year-old should be making up his own neologisms."

 

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"Her Crystal Reckoning" (... You can definitely just skip over this nonsense.)

“I, Guardian of Victimized Gems, have long been tasked with vanquishing all brigands of wealth who threaten the sanctity of stones of pure life. One such jeweler, a dame most revered, harvested a fortune beyond all others. Unbeknownst to her, Woman of Glory to the world, Incarnation of Greed to me, I guided her hand through her lavish tarn of wealth to a stone that would divulge to her the true nature of her spirit. So transpired the Six Ages of the Falsely Commended Jeweler.”

I. Homage

A noble sorter of precious jewels,

Her heinous hair streams in sporadic spools.

A jubilant, jarlarian jeweler,

An imperial and Medusal ruler,

Her palace, ostentatious and bold,

Lay around her, a spectacle of gold.

A stairway—ascension to her heartland,

An archway—gilded and grand,

A chandelier—majestic, effulgent,

Each in a manor – blessed to be

Inhabited by a lady as gallant,

As honored and envied as she.

                So holy a home.

                So merry a master.

 

She kneels among her godly gifts,

And, through the stones, she starts to sift.

Her fingers dance across her bureau’s hearth

And skim the surface of her stash of wealth.

Stalagmites line the box’s sapphiric shores,

A microcosm, gouged in gyring moors.

Its horizon’s gold mocks a sun’s shine,

The lake a sandbox in a court divine.

 

She trembles in reverence of crystalline shoals,

Reaches across the iridescent, brimming bowl.

The glimmer of a garnet grapples her gaze

From the far shore of her tarn’s vast space.

Drawn as a fishing line pulled straight,

Her tendril touches the stone, her wishful mate,

Coils around it and yanks it from the frame,

Drops it in her sac of kaleidoscope claims.

 

            II. Lust

She spots, in the obscure depths of her box,

Where leeches and crabs skirt the opaque lake floor

A stone, untouched by patrons of pedestals,

Painted amorphous by a sweeping ripple.

She divides the waters and unveils the tide,

Plunges through the surface mosaic

And descends into a savage arena,

An entrapment of viscous sludge.

She steers toward the altar at its core

Where, submerged in murmuring mire,

Misshapen by deep fathoms of neglect,

The extrinsic stone lay—sole and abject.

 

She extends her fingers to its gradient text

And feels the web of ridges, its nest.

Thus, determining its role in the mass,

She ends her avid conquest.

A scratch in an infallible dish,

A crest in a tranquil spyglass pool,

A nimble spider long having dodged her cleansing sweep,

A parasite latched to her jewel box.

Not a ruby, opal, or emerald,

Not the gem she had foreseen,

But a crumbling and barren rock.

 

It idly lay disfigured,

Worth not a splinter of its neighbors,

Too long disgracing her pool,

Too long draining on the gleam of her jewels.

Her eager eyes dim and narrow.

Her fingers ensnare the stone.

                Her intent hardens.

                Her clutch tenses.

With a vehement and downward thrust,

She bashes it on the crook of her case!

The stone, split in serrated halves,

Lies at the feet of an interim lady,

A wealthy and esteemed maiden,

A rampant queen, lost in frenzy,

                Demolisher of Disgraceful,

                Bearer of Beautiful,

                Vesper of Valiance.

 

III. Deceit

She inspects her victim’s gash,

Leers inward on the gaping chasm,

And spies a shimmer, a spangled crust, within.

I, its Guardian, rush into her tranquil palace,

Stand between her and her jewel box.

Directly to her I declare:

“Behold! Crystalline flesh!

A heart encased in gravel!

O Judge of all jewels!

Naïve, imbecilic fool!

You thought it hollow!

You thought it lame!

But you see now its crystal blood!

Its life, superior to all your wants!

At last I have netted your ignorance!

I’ve taken grip of your tail, tied your talons!

I’ve harnessed your horns!

Stripped you of your blades!

You thrash, you slither, but the cords constrict!

 

Bear my stone’s curse!

Or—better—end your thirst!

My stone, slashed by your acerbic hand!

Excretes on the populous below!

Its blood bathes the fateful—the open-minded!

It lives as I—in my place!

So I repeat myself!

Suffer this affliction!

I command it thrice!

Endure the consequences of your folly!

Break not our hallowed jewels!

Allow my words eternal resonance within!

Possess you not supreme knowledge?

Know you not the luster of a victimized gem?”

 

            IV. Decay

My words pierce her like lances,

She collapses, lashed by my spiked tongue.

This gluttonous thief of precious jewels,

This shallow and vile mistress of enslaved minds and brittle stock,

Reaches toward the prize she has imprisoned and maimed,

Clutches the slighter, blooded half, heavy in her hand,

As a cadaverous behemoth, crippled,

Pained by the strain of its chains.

She casts aside her sac of lightweight gems,

Smattering across the floor a tainted stream,

A prismic flow of amethyst and onyx

A surface of granite that deads its shade and shine,

A river of obsidian waters malign.

 

            V. Dagger

At last her words take shield,

Suppress my curses and resound

Ripple across her golden cavern.

I step back as she demands:

“You see my eyes stray now from my gems,

And toward the contour of the half in my hand—

A riven crag—cleaved by my razing scythe,

A blood-spattered mountain, volcanic.

Its crimson glory raises my clenching fist.

I bring the stone to the height of my gaze,

Exhausting my strength in this forced quietus,

I curse you, O decrepit state!

I plead for you, O deprecate soul!

But no answer do I get!

So let this be my end!”

 

                Tearless eyes unblinking,

                Placid gaze fastened forward

                Humble arm held steady,

                Palm punctured by salient points,

She fervently plunges the halberd gem,

Spears it through her temple!

 

And there the two lay on silver tiles,

A prisoner triumphant over its warden,

A hoary brigand, bones loosely clad, twine slipping from her scalp,

And a half globe polished by lacerations.

A kleptomaniacal, Krakien brute

And a noble muse for our precious youth.

 

The geode’s layered membrane dies,

Its fleshed flakes taken by an aerial tide,

Uncovering its freed, flaring shine

That burns away the gilded, stretching vines,

Wipes clean the wicked walls of mud,

Of Her Majesty’s crystal edifice,

A vigorous and expansive tomb.

 

            VI. Desire

“Now divert your eyes, child of mines,

While you take from here your birthright

Else the blaze shall strip you of your sight

And you, too, will release such lights.

Take heed and be weary of rocks you find.

Beware my odious and slashing scythe

For I will guard these stones till night,

And no other shall manifest—quite such life.”

 

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Then I looked at the short story I was working on, titled "Progeria," and a single thought came to mind instantly:

"I'm still kind of pretentious." And also, after a few seconds of reading: "I'm still equally focused on death."

 

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“Progeria” (Again, you can definitely skip this too...)

 

When a pair of adolescent squirrels or chipmunks—I wasn’t sure which—dropped from the hole in my bedroom wall, I thought it was the s’more-scented candle on the end of my shelf, just enough wax around its wick for a full afternoon’s comforting, campfire scent. It was only once I walked over to pick it up in the morning that I saw it was still in its rightful place, blocking from view the binding of a young adult dystopian novel I’d read every summer for the past eight years, since my parents decided I was old enough to learn that I wasn’t the only one predicted to have an unfortunate future.

 

It was only later that night when I realized what had happened, spotting the two small rodents in the corner of my room, mostly covered by a week-old Dave Matthews Band poster that curled lazily toward the floor, stuck to the wall at only the bottom, the command strips not strong enough to keep it vertically flat. The two siblings had fallen from a height of at least six feet, from where their relatives had chewed their way out of the wall for fresh air years ago. By the stiffened arrangement of their limbs and the roughly bundled patches of fur, they had likely died at least a day ago, left behind by a neglectful mother, to be otherwise disposed of like two pinecones previously buried by dirt and grass.

 

Despite my attachment to select dystopian fiction, I’ve never entirely understood the fascination with the end of the world itself. Every year, the Earth’s expected to be engulfed in one of the sun’s spontaneous solar flares or experience massively fatal earthquakes or storms or meteors. One year, it was said the moon would soon be pulled in by the gravitational pull of our planet and that, in the next twenty years, it would crash down to the earth and knock it off its axis, either sending us into the sun or sending us across space to inevitably collide with something else, sparking the chain reaction of a planetary Newton’s cradle. It’s a similar reaction that I’ve seen in analysis of my DNA, a maladjustment in a single rung that causes all the rest after it to attach at bizarre angles like magnets too weak to attach to one another straight-on.

 

Some years are more unclear than others, but the focus of pre-apocalyptic conversation is always on the unfortunate, so-called fact that some two hundred teenagers in town would be falling just short of high school graduation.

 

(to be completed)

 

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Despite my continuous and blatant obsessions with death and with myself, both pieces of writing are equally beautiful. And, before you close your browser because I'm so obnoxiously self-absorbed, I'll clarify that by saying the writing is "beautiful," I mean that the memories of writing them are beautiful. No, I'm not saying death is not beautiful(although I'm also not saying it's not). And, no, I'm not calling myself beautiful. And, no, I'm not even saying the content is beautiful. I merely state that both are equally beautiful, and, therefore, both times in my life—my senior year of high school and this start of my junior year in college—have been equally beautiful.

 

I don't claim that everyone will share this opinion in any way. After all, you don't know the story, the situation, or the inspiration behind either piece(though some of you out there may understand the reference to the disease, progeria, in the title and to Sam Berns of my hometown). However, I feel I need to further explicate—out of fear that this won't have any purpose beyond its being a shameless plug for a long-lost poem and a new story of mine—that "Her Crystal Reckoning" may be rightfully retired, but it is one aspect picked out of a perpetual stream of memories from my first twenty-one years that reminds me exactly why life is worth being optimistic about.

 

If I have anything to say about it, we're all here for a lot longer than twenty-one years, and if there can be as many reasons to be optimistic as I have easily retrievable memories, then why would I want to waste any time concerning myself with negativity manifested in any form. And so arises my latest pet peeve—self-deprecation, specifically that which I see joked about sarcastically and willingly embraced.

 

One of my tattoos (I won't even apologize this time for my self-obsession; I mean, a blog's meant to be all about me... isn't it?) which I  just so happened to have gotten done between workshops with Mr. Mitchell on "Her Crystal Reckoning," reads: "Only when one's perspective of Possibility is stretched to its fullest and shattered can one achieve absolute catharsis and serenity." And another, similarly minded one reads: "True strength originates only in Hope for a better future and in the people you spend your life saving." There's a reason I capitalized "Possibility" and "Hope." (It's kinda what I'm all about... Letting go of the concept of possibility and finding hope in any situation.) And it reminds me that optimism has always been my focus—perhaps with a few unavoidable detours.

 

But still, as I pause and take my headphones out breaking my concentration on this post and on the Chris Mann song I'm listening to, I realize that I don't express my positivity in as outward a manner as I imagine I should. So, I've made it my goal: to be openly optimistic on a daily basis, not to trick people into thinking I'm happy if I'm not or to overlook all the problems at hand, but to have the kind of effect that my second tattooed quote captures. I don't expect to save people in the traditional sense. (There! Proof that I don't perceive myself to be entirely infallible!) But I want to save people some stress. I want to save them from negativity. I want to give them memories to carry with them through their lives and to look back on later and find beauty in.

 

(My god, I really am still pretentious. Sorry, not sorry.)