Twice a year the system comes to me
presents itself in a mandatory form
and it asks me:
in what ways do you participate in society?
in what ways are you working on participating more?

They mean I should find a job.
Have more money so i can pay more taxes.
If that's too much maybe I can volunteer
help meet all those needs the system doesn't want to pay for.

Dear system
I participate in society
by feeding peanuts to birds
do you see how happy the brds are when i do that?
do you see them then fly away, and spread that joy all around town?

Dear system,
I participate in society
by leaving kind words for all of my friends
who are being crushed by systems
I try to create reasons for hope and reduce loneliness

Dear system,
I participate in society
Whenever I write a poem
I work very hard on making people see both pain and beauty
from an all new perspective

Dear system,
I participate in society
By yelling FUCK YOU
whenever you try to reduce my value
to fit inside a question box.

#Poetri

(written in august 2025)

I can see
you're falling apart
again
because the world is cruel
again

and I wish
my arms would stretch
all the way to you
and then some
so i could wrap them around you several times

and i wish
that was enough
for the world
to leave you be
so that my hug
would keep you
together

#PoetRi

In the basement there's a crack in the floor
below it you could see dirt
the basement gets one hour of light per day on average
but there's a little plant there
in the crack in the floor
making due

it knows it will never be
a famous tree or an impressive bush
1 stem, 2 leaves, that's it
it's so little, but so much
life is streaming through every cell
celebrating all existance

outside the trees are talking
life has been hard this year, there was a drought
how long until they can't survive?
and the trees say
'if the rain will no longer pour on my leaves
if the sun doesn't dry them
if the bugs don't tickle me when they wake up
i wouldn't want to be here, even if i could still sustain life'

in the basement the little plant dreams
of rainstorms and sunbeams
it knows it will likely never have those
but it knows the value of being alive
all of it wants to grow
if grow is not an option, it wants to stay,
maintain, persist
it can imagine dying
but not imagine wanting to

#PoetRi

I didn't know my eyes have sea in them.
Autistic cliche, no eye contact, I had no idea mine had colour
Not until internetfriends
When photo's were still hard to share

'What colour are your eyes' a common question
'Gee I don't know' wasn't a good answer
So I got a mirror and looked and saw the sea
My eyes are green like when she storms from pain

Later I looked because I wanted to know
Sea green eyes, like all my siblings.
My father has them, his mother.
We all grew up with the sea in our blood.

Descendants from fishermen who refuse to eat fish
We know what swims needs to be free
We know the price of pain and yet the beauty
if you let it all foam free.

Now I'm very ill and
the sea is out of my reach
Just saw her picture though and it wasn't hard to notice

she's got my eyes.

#PoetRi
Written in november 2023. Republishing today because my grandma died and I keep seeing her eyes when I look into the mirror

1 in 3 doctors does not believe ME/CFS is a physical illness
means
we don't know
when we meet that new doctor
if it will be help
or harm
today

means we consider lying
because they might be more likely
to treat that broken leg or common cold
if they don't know what else ills us

means we are terrified
when a government form
that should provide money or help
is asking for 'medical proof'
we know that question leads to disbelief

means
we avoid going to doctors
because we know to expect gaslighting
and we know the price of trauma
might be higher than the help
we might get

and 1 in 3 doctors
not believing our illness exist
does sadly not imply
that 2 in 3 doctors
end up helping us

#PoetRi

Wrote this this weekend when a friend was gaslit by yet another doctor. I quoted '1 in 3 doctors' from memory and I think I read it somewhere, years ago. I tried to factcheck it and spent more spoons on that than I should have. I found many many different numbers, and most suggest the number I used here was too low. But I can't say for sure.

The neighbours called official people
they said
I'm no longer here.
No one like me lives here.

That's a fact now
It's written down
on several desks
into several files

I'm no longer here
No one like me lives here.

I heard stories of ghosts
who missed the obvious
they go on with their life
as if living
they forgot to believe that they died

It all makes sense now
how I cannot get a doctor to listen to me
how they almost took my homecare away
Ghosts have the hardest time being heard
unless you try a seance
you won't understand what i need.

So I wander
through this building
bed to bathroom
bathroom to bed
on good days, maybe the balcony
the house is hollow, left empty
it wonders why my footsteps do no longer
make a sound

But would I be a ghost
too forgetful to remember dying
I could forget how ill I am
and I would live

I could be a ghost in the movie theather
see the latest movie (no dizzyness)
I could be a ghost walking in the forest
No blood left, no need to worry about POTS now.
I could be shopping
without having to pay.
I could be a ghost on a train,
destination anywhere.
Not for a second would I stay in bed if I didn't have a body too tired to leave it.

I heard stories of neighbours
who missed the obvious
and I am still
so very much alive

#PoetRi

The name they used in that email
a bittersweet reminder
of who I once
tried to be

A young version of myself
aspiring to live up to
everything my parents named me

I would embrace my role in society so well
I would finally make them proud
and well-respected

That name was returned back to me today
in an email from a website
who I remember promising they had deleted all my data
funny how they can then email me still.

They offer the person with my old name
my old life
I could sign up on their dating site for free now
I could mask and pretend to be female
And write on my profile how often I attend church
Maybe God will bless me this time!
You never know which way he will use to find me a partner.

I could go back to that
it's not tempting but I could
pretend to be who I never was
like I always did

Maybe I can fall back in line
Be a churchgoing genderpretending polite woman
I could perform gratitude and piety

Or I could
Smile
And realise
that old name
made me fight so hard to live a life I thought I needed to want
And it wasn't even succesfull

This datingsite can have my old name
I have a new one
A name which doesn't try to make me who I should be
but only
acknowledges who I am

#PoetRi