Eggshells on a Butcher's Flag

Eggshells on a Butcher’s Flag

For: Jarman, Rudkin, Gupta, Gray

You tell me you have to walk on eggshells,
and I wonder what eggshells you mean.
Is it the fact you can’t call me a fag
because the same blood flows in both our veins?

Is it that you can’t say how much
I disappoint your sense of your own manhood
when I paint my face and talk
like I’m a girl?

Is it the thought that all the other men
laugh at you behind your scrum-half’s back,
snickering if I’m the best you managed,
there must be something wrong with you as well?

Let me tell you something: for years I woke each morning wishing
for a love I thought was cut off 
 by the cage of hair impaling 
every inch of a body I feared 

would never move the way it wished to
for fear of fingers which might, first, 
just point and laugh - then, later, curl
into corrective fists; for years I woke up knowing

that the hands I wished would touch me,
the strong hands of a tough and boylike girl
enclosing mine and giving me a space
where I could yield in ways that your man’s world

would never let me, making me feel safe enough
to let my body tumble, without fear, into joy,
were just a fantasy that I span to myself 
in my spurned lover’s bed, back in that house
where you still saw me as a boy, where

every move was policed…

But they weren’t fantasy. I have been held
and held in turn those hands,
faced down the pointing fingers and the fists,
and plucked and burned and alchemised away

the spines that once imprisoned me;
have loved in ways that your straight pride
could never let itself be loved, and lost so many 
that your stones will never honour. 

Like one I knew who fought 
to earn the things you took for granted,
and in doing so proved more a man
than you will ever be, and grew beyond
even that patriarchally
prized category,

yet died alone, despairing
that the world you think so just -
no, not a world that you think just,
a world that’s given you so much

and yet by which you still feel slighted -
would refuse to grant them space
which you assume you take by right.
Oh, you could never stand one night

in that Bengali’s platform shoes,
yet you insist we listen to your
clapped-out Clapton blues 
about how people hate this country

as if that hatred only ever went in one
direction; as if that hatred didn’t form
its own long, proud tradition of prick-kicking,
as if that hate were not a higher, purer way

of loving Britain, as if we who work 
as if we live in the first days of something better
were not your one hope of deliverance
from the true bringers of terror, 

who advance with an absorbent flag
in one hand and with Trident in the other
then use the chloroform infused 
in butcher’s apron rag to smother

you right back into your stupor…
But you’ll never see those crooks for
what they are. Just as you’ll never see
the one who really walks on eggshells 
isn’t you. It’s me. 

This started out as an attempt to transcribe, from an audio recording, an old poem of mine which has been much on my mind lately; but in the process of doing so I found myself changing some of the lines because things which were then worries and uncertainties are now things I have experienced; and then it expanded further to include a national critique, deriving largely from the fact one of the things I bonded with one of the four dedicatees over was a shared love of Derek Jarman's writing. It may expand further still: I feel there may be work to do to stitch the national back into the personal here, but by the time I came to what is currently the last verse it was very late (or, depending on how you look at it, very early) and I badly needed sleep. 

The pictures are an attempt at drawing Rachel Reeves sulking on the front bench which wound up looking more like an Alasdair Gray woman, and a study from Sebastiano del Piombo's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha. 

The Peace I Want

Alasdair Gray, from a photo used

in his obituary in the Paris Review.

I haven't drawn much this month.I haven't written much. I haven't updated this blog. I haven't done much of anything. Early in the month I had to go through a brutal two-hour telephone interrogation as part of my

PIP application. Then less than a week later I learned that a fellow poet had taken their own life. This stirred a whole bunch of complicated feelings, not least around my own almost constant desire to do the

same. In the past few weeks my sleep has been all over the place - long nights lying awake looking at abstracts of overdose autopsies, dropping off midafternoon, sleeping either too much or too little.

Then this weekend I got my decision letter -shockingly early, given how long I was advised to wait, but the reason for that became clear when I realised it was a refusal apparently written to be as insulting as possible. Not a rational surprise - they almost always refuse initially- but still an emotional blow. And all this against the background of the Starmerite regime's ongoing war against trans and disabled people, and the fact I need to find somewhere new to live by July.

I've been rereading Gray's 'Lanark' lately. Gray is forensic and unstinting in showing what a horrible place this world can be for those on the wrong end of it-how utterly and unrelentingly it destroys, body and soul, those of us who can't mutilate ourselves into something adapted to mesh with its cogs, and who instead wind up being slowly, painfully ground down. That's been on my mind a lot this month.

'Stay alive out of spite!' they say, and it's true that part of me, knowing full well that there are people out there who would happily see me dead, wants to keep going to cheat them of that victory. But it keeps getting harder. And increasingly I just want it to be over. I want the peace of knowing there's no more of it to come.

Our Revolution... (video)

 

Our Revolution Will Not Be Illegalised

I am not a TV,

a CD, a TS, a TG,

a scam, a trap, a troon,

a 'huge problem for a sane world'

(though I may be a problem for you);

I am a biological woman

and my bloods will show you that's true,

but long before I got on hormones,

and long before you ruled,

I knew just who and what I was.

I knew it when I sang the words

to Jackie's Strength on my own in my room,

refusing the pull of my diaphragm,

sanctioning breath to my throat,

awake and alive and aligned with myself

in ways outside the scope of your court. 

I knew it in moments of pushing my body

so hard I could throw it aside: knew

when other girls threw me, knew in the honesty

miles forced upon me, the oneness I felt

with the play of a sword, and in dancing,

and dancing, and dancing, and dancing,

I knew it in the way I felt suits fit me,

knew it on my wedding day

when we both joked that I looked like a lesbian, 

knew it in the things we did for years before our marriage;

knew when my first girlfriend held my hands

in her much bigger hands;

knew on my back in a dozen beds where

other bodies helped mine understand.

What I know that I am remains constant

whatever the laws of this land

which beggars itself for the bucks of rich bigots,

where a judge, as a boon to his neighbour the litigant,

can make thousands of people no longer legitimate

with one lazy stroke of his doddering hand

- an absolute bargain for seventy grand,

but meaningless. I've always known what I am

and no bent court can change that. I'm not a KC,

I'm something more worthwhile, that I fought to be,

and I assure you that silk looks much better on me:

an all-natural trans woman, already free. 

A Post about Daredevil

 

If Matt Murdock is serious about getting New York back from the Kingpin, he is going to have to start acting a lot more like Frank Castle. 

Because you cannot run a successful insurgency and respect the rule of law. The goal of an insurgency is not to knock out perps and leave them tied-up for the cops with a cheeky note from your friendly neighbourhood vigilante. The goal of an insurgency is to kill the fucking cops. 

The goal of an insurgency is to bleed the enemy, to impose a cost on them in terms of loss of manpower, loss of resources, and loss of civilian morale which destroys their will to continue. If you want to conduct a successful insurgency, you have to start thinking like a terrorist, and using the tactics of the terrorist. 

Insurgency is not getting in the ring and duking it out mano e mano. It's sneaking up on the enemy and slitting their throats. It's seducing troops, getting them drunk, and taking them to the woods where your buddies can shoot them. It's poisoning food. It's sniping. It's planting IEDs. 

It is, in every way, about punishing the occupying force. Of course Frank would be better at it. Hell, we see that in the post-credits scene. 

This is, of course, just a post about a superhero show. 

Spy Wednesday (video)

 

Spy Wednesday

 

Spy Wednesday

This Spy Wednesday

Judas wears a three-piece suit

cut like post-Tin Machine Bowie

and curates her socials:

shares a poster for a gig,

a time-lapse of her signing,

some positive quotes;

but says nothing to antagonize 

The Guardian. After all, 

she has work to promote,

and it took so much

to get them on-side.

No sense in risking that now. 

There’s no profit

in broadcasting virtue.

In posting a pink and blue flag.

Solidarity lived in the old world.

They don’t give out prizes for that.

Play this right and she might win the Orwell:

Why risk that by rocking the boat?

So she chases two Nexium with Chivas Regal

and worries the knot at her throat.