Emmet Michael

https://calgaryguardian.com/calgary-music-emmet-michael/

My worth is not measured by my quantity or quality of work. Art can just be what it is, sacred just for existing outside of someone. It cannot be measured as good or bad, only honest or dishonest.

I am…

There is a feeling of remarkable nothingness where I used to feel implicit purpose. However, no peace of mind is worthy of rejecting the absolute truth of finitude. That is where meaning comes from. We may only have this life…

I am haunted by the prospect of “growing out of” that which I am meant to be held by.

My own shaking hands coddle my resistance to joy.

I am pulling drag after relentless drag of dissatisfaction - one shallow…

When considering what queer joy means, I refer to the everyday beauty I find in nature. There is so much diversity in the natural world that we overlook and take for granted. “Queer” by definition is anything that transcends what…

I suppose anxiety is the tension between longing for more and settling for less. 

Stillness is both my greatest fantasy and my greatest fear. 

How do I learn to sit with something when it is always changing? 

How do we…

Don’t speak your truth, know it.

Know your worth well enough that you never have to justify it again.

Climb to the top of the hill without having to die on it.

Feel the weight of your body suppress the…

I am dying a spiritual death, and I don’t know if I believe in rebirth. 

I am heaving cynicism out of lungs gifted to me by creation. 

I’m alive, I am spirit-filled, and that in and of itself should be…

I crave to be haunted in the same way a car wreck demands our irrevocable attentions.

My spirit bears the threat of being totalled - of skidding gracefully into some ditch of waning memory.

When my pick up truck fishtailed…

I still remember the day I told a crowd of 200 strangers that I was transgender. It was the first time I’d disclosed this to an audience at a formal event. It was never something I HAD to do, or…