De garrotibus non disputandum est

 

(I started writing this poem back when the government's plans to ban pornography which featured 'strangulation or suffocation' was merely a proposal - in the time it's taken me to finish it, that proposal has now become law - a law I disagree with. As I point out below, an awful lot of women enjoy some consensual breath play from time to time, and as one of them I resent the government not just policing my sexual imaginary but implying that it in some way contributes to violence against women and girls when - again, as I point out below - I think the causes of that are much closer to home, where this government is concerned. I wrote the bulk of this in one session when, as I say, the law was just a proposal, and the rest of it today. The result is something that varies very wildly in tone and structure, and which may need a lot of editing before I can get it into a form I'm happy with. I publish this version of it here because there are some bits of both sections I quite like, and I think it would be nice to have some record of those bits somewhere as the poem eventually coheres into what it's properly going to be.)

Some go under the gun when they get a tattoo,
some make do with the ol’ stick-n-poke;
some like to know that they’re loved when they screw,
some find that puts them off their stroke;
some like getting down to it, some want to be woo’d
-         and some of us like to be choked.
 
Some caress with ethereal lightness of touch,
and some love to maul, grab and grope;
some people don’t bother with sex all that much,
some hit a dry spell and can’t cope;
some like it tender and some like it rough
and some of us like to be choked:
 
We want leather gauntlets instead of kid gloves
-         we may be, in all other ways, woke;
we might push back on claims kids need toughening up,
and interrogate off-colour jokes –
but in amorous matters, when push comes to shove,
some of us like to be choked
 
with consent, within limits, with safewords in place,
and having informed our close folk
where we’re going, and leaving a trail they can trace,
quite aware of the risk we have took
for the thrill of at once feeling helpless and safe.
It can feel nice to be choked:
 
to be gradually forced between strong arms or thighs
which then tighten their grip on your throat;
to feel strength leave your body, to feel panic rise,
the relief and release at the break:
it’s both terror and pleasure you’ll see in my eyes
in that moment. I like to be choked,
 
and while I will admit I’m a deviant case,
I know that I’m far from alone.
Thirty per cent of us broads share my tastes
(which is ten per cent more than the blokes):
a sizable chunk of the whole human race,
it seems, rather likes to be choked,
 
and I don’t think you’ve room in the prison estate
to throw so many folk in the poke
for consumption of content reflecting our tastes,
as you piously seek to propose,
alongside the thousands you mean to detain
for the Palestine flags on their clothes:
 
you might get off dreaming of your own police state
but said state’s something we all oppose,
from the tops to the bottoms. We won’t tolerate
your intolerance of people whose
one crime is the fact that we get entertained
watching people like us getting choked.
 
So what if we do? I think Cop Killer’s cool,
that doesn’t make me Raoul Moat!
I liked Tommy Lee Jones in that Under Siege, too,
and I’m not out here hijacking boats!
Yet apparently you think I’m down to abuse
because I get off on being choked?
 
There’s a word you’re ignoring in your rush to censure
and that word, of course, is consent,
though that doesn’t surprise me – your mate Pete’s pal, Jeffrey,

wasn’t real clear on what that word meant;
him, and lots of chaps friendly with your buddy Wesley
seem to be of a sinister bent,
 
like the cops on that force you so keenly defended,
your kaffeeklatsch chums from the Met,
men like Couzens and Carrick who– do you remember? –
were both once assigned to protect
the likes of yourself and your high-value brethren,
like Andy, who claimed not to sweat,
 
or your manager, Charlie, once best friends with Jim –
oh, I know we don’t mention that, yes,

it isn’t the done thing to talk about him
but I’m not one of your friends in the press.
I write poems, not PR, Keir, I don’t give a shit
what you’d rather have me forget,
 
and I have no incentive to not join the dots up
ahen you make what I’m into a crime
or have all my mates and their grandmothers locked up
for t-shirts that say Palestine
while you and your media mates march in lockstep
to run cover for genocide,
 
not just in the Holy Land but here at home,
where 46 trans kids have died
since your friend Mrs Cass had their blockers withdrawn
and Wes came along for the ride.
Dead kids worry me more than choking in porn.
Mustn’t have my priorities right.
 
And I know the excuses you’re going to make:
it wasn’t your hands on those throats.
You can’t be blamed for what you made them choose
when you made them strangers to hope.
And furthermore…
                I’ve heard more than enough.
It’s a shower I need, not your cope.
 
So I’ll be on my way,
with this one thing to say:

I hope 

that 

one day,

in
an

en

tire

ly

un

kinky

way
 
I get to see you fucking choke.

The Next Day

 

They'd never dredged the like of it: 

a mound of lego, sodden books

and posters, toys, pig-Latin plaques,

ceramic shards that once were mugs

and, threaded through the seeping haul,

scarves of scarlet, bootleg yellow and

authentic gold, a bolognese 

of guilty conscience - things 

they'd not be seen with down the tip. 

'They must have done it in the dark,'

one muses, 'were they queueing up

or side-by-side lined down the quay?

Bet no-one met another's eye. 

Was it like this when Jimmy died?'

An older head shakes. 'Nowt to chuck

except the medals. Few enough

of those about. And shellsuits could 

be scouser costumes. Nowt like this.'

They sat there silent, paced and smoked. 

The youngest spat: 'They must have known.'

A Work of Mercy

Looking at a dog the night before

she dies, she will remember

a conspiracy of kindness:

the cat they called Old Smokey,

smuggled in from the back lane

and spoiled with sprats or cuts of ham

behind their mother's back,

and how, one night in winter

at their window, averring

in near-chorus that he must be cold, 

they'd hear their mother say

you think I'm stupid, but I know

what you get up to, then

go on then, let him in. 

(for Evelyn Fish, 1950-2022)

First World Contempt

I would like to make him live one day

the way he has made others live.

I would like him to wake up in rubble

with dust in his belly and throat,

and walk, on blistered feet, to somewhere 

somebody said there might be food

and find none. I would like him to know

those who raise his plight in the rich nations

are dragged off to prison 

for the words that they have 

on their T-shirts. 

I would like him to know

jokes more callous than his,

and less funny, are being made about him 

by the golf club bores 

and the roundabout painters. 

I would like him to learn what it's like 

to feel first world contempt. 

I know that I ought not to want this.

That it is uncharitable,

even to him; rather, what I should want

is for a new spirit to grow in him,

inspire him to right his own wrongs

then go out to right more. 

This is what I should want. 

It is not what I do want. 

A Whole Civilisation

 

When planes flying from our bases

'destroy a civilisation' tonight,

what will we say? 

When people of that civilisation 

scream rage in our faces,

what will we say?

'Woman, I am not one of them'?

Will we tell them that this

is not who we are? 

Will we express bitter contrition 

and say not in our name?

I remember one night, back in Brixton,

my friend Nila saying to me 

"You say 'them' when you speak of the English,

but you're English. It's not 'them', it's 'we'."

I don't know what I'll say

when our planes fly tonight

sowing death. But I will not deny

that, as much as I hate it,

they fly in my name;

and when the blowback comes

I will accept that I, just like the rest of us,

am as legitimate a target,

a more legitimate target,

than two-hundred schoolgirls 

or a six year old child in a taxi,

and will accept my civilisation 

- about which I once pompously worried -

died long ago;

and pray,

for the rest of the world,

that its corpse may stop shaking.

Good Friday poem

 

Noose pin worn by members of the Israeli knesset to show their support for the introduction of the death penalty for Palestinian political prisoners. 

your job is this

a man lies down

across two planks

you hammer nails

into his wrists

into his feet

the nails are long

the nails are thick

the nails are sharp

your job is this

you hammer nails

you do not flinch

you do not stop

your job is this

to never stop

to never flinch

to never think

of them as wrists

to never look

them in the eye

to never hear

the words they cry

you hammer nails

your job is this

your job is this

your job is this

On the Uses of the Cross

 

I read about the Catholic Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa blessing the city of Jerusalem with a relic of the True Cross in response to his having been prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre yesterday afer having done something along the same lines myself. At the end of a mass protest against the Israeli-owned Rafael weapons factory on Scotswood Road, there was a moment of silence, after which attendees of the demonstration were invited to place daffodils we'd been given in the fence to remember the children killed in Palestine by that factory's products. As I was still carrying the palm cross I'd picked up at the church service I'd been to earlier in the day, it seemed an appropriate gesture to put that in the fence as well. So I did. 

Yeah, I've started going to church again. Trust me, no-one is more surprised or embarrassed by this development than I, and this blog is not going to turn into an effort at evangelism, an activity I am highly suspicious of in most of its forms. You really don't need to tell people about Jesus, folks: He's a foundational figure in Western culture. He's in paintings. We say His name when we jam our fingers in the door. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not saving someone's soul when you tell them a very well-worn story about the crucifixion like it's news, you're just making Christianity more cringe. But I did think it might be worth getting some of my thoughts about the cross down here, partly because a particular attitude to the cross among certain types of soi-disant 'Christian' is somewhat responsible for my recent transformation into some kind of church lady, and partly because, with Good Friday coming up, I want to take issue with those same crucicentralist attitudes more generally.  

Some of you may not be interested in reading a long ramble about the cross,  and if you're one of those I'll give you the nut graf here and let you get on with your day. The German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle, who coined the term 'Christofascism', wrote that adherents to that particular perversion 'know the cross only as a magical symbol of what Jesus has done for us, not as a sign of the poor man who was tortured to death as a political criminal...a betrayal of the disappointed, a miracle weapon in the service of the mighty'. And the argument I'm going to make here, such as it is, is that, especially in times like our own, we really ought to be focusing more on Jesus the tortured political criminal than Christ Pantocrator, and that should inform the way we look at the cross. Or, to put it another way, we have to regard any image of the crucifixion as being fundamentally substitutable with this image: 

And if you want, you can stop reading here.

Sölle's words struck me because during the recent street activism I've been doing defending those housed in Newcastle's New Bridge Hotel against the fascist thugs who come out every weekend to hurl abuse at them, one thing I've noticed is that some people on the fascist side really do wave the cross about like it's a magic wand. They seem to believe that the crucifix has the same effect on Muslims, socialists and queer & trans folk that it has on vampires: that if they only angle it just so, and say the correct form of words (fascists are big on that phrase, 'form of words', have you noticed? Nigel Farage often uses it in his non-apologies. If you think about it for a while, it tells you something about them), the Power Of Christ Will Compel Us to take up our placards and banners and walk, giving the fash an unbarred run-up right to the hotel door. To me, this kind of carry-on is performative at best and at worst, frankly, a form of idolatry. Because if you're waving the cross around as a totem, then your engagement with the act it represents is fundamentally shallow and devoid of meaning. 

So I decided to start setting some of these characters straight. The admonishing of sinners is, after all, one of the seven spiritual works of mercy. And one way in which I did this was by making and holding a placard reading MATTHEW 25:35 ('When I was hungry, you gave me something to eat, when I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink, when I was a stranger you welcomed me in.'). Now, initially, when I started using this reference, it was just as a kind of theological gotcha. But the more I actually looked at and thought about the particular chapter it comes from, the more I came to see it as central to Christianity itself - as the core ethical challenge which the teaching and example of Jesus boils down to. 

So as a quick summary - Matthew 25 is the chapter in which Jesus outlines the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. You probably already know this, but basically the idea is that at the end of time, on the Day of Judgement, Jesus is going to call everyone who ever lived in for a meeting and divide people into two groups based on their conduct in life. He duly does this, and when people in each group ask why he's put them there, he says it's based on whether they were nice to him or not. And people in both groups point out, not unreasonably, that they haven't actually either done or refused to do anything nice for Jesus himself, at which point he pulls a substitution move, pointing out that 'whatever you did (or did not do - AJ) for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did (or did not &c)for me'.

And this is actually worth thinking about, this interchangeability Jesus insists on between Himself, as Son of God, and the least of us. It's something I think a lot of us pay lip service to, but actually think about it. What Jesus is asking us to do is to treat people we regard as the absolute lowest of the low, the most abject, outcast people, with the same love and reverence we treat, or would like to think we treat, Him with. 

I actually think this is the hardest possible thing to believe in the Bible. Genuinely. It's comparatively easy to believe all the miraculous stuff, because obviously the Son of God can work miracles, right? That comes with the territory. He doesn't have to be constrained by the laws of biology or thermodynamics - He has a note from His Dad. But to actually believe, and to act on the belief, that the lowest drug addict on the street putting their hand out to you for a quid, or the most annoying dickhead on the bus watching TikTok on they damn phone, is as holy and divine and worthy of your time as the Messiah, that's fucking impossible (which, I think, is why the only prayer Jesus specifically directs people to pray in the gospels includes a line where we admit we fucked up and apologise for it). But just because it is impossible, that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to do it as much as we possibly can. 

And the thing is: that interchangeability of Jesus with the lowest of the low should also govern how we look at the crucifixion, and not just because that event, allowing Himself to be tortured to death over the course of a day to save every human being who ever has or ever will live - yes, including those who blasted rope to Waluigi hentai - represents the ne plus ultra of this universal compassion Jesus is trying to teach. 

A theological text of profound importance

But because, as I've mentioned before here, crucifixion was a punishment the Roman Empire reserved for the lowest of the low, and to be crucified was not just mean to be as painful as possible, but as humiliating as possible. Imagine what a crucified body smelled like, after bleeding and baking for hours in the Middle Eastern sun. Imagine the pain and strain on the joints of the body. Imagine how weak you would feel, forced to adopt an unnatural position and knowing that the only thing that holds you up is the very torturing frame that you're pinned to. Imagine the special humiliation of being raised up, literally looking down on everyone before you, but all of those people looking back up at you and jeering. Because you're filth. You're scum. You're the lowest form of life. You must be - because you're up there on a cross. 

And I do mean a and not the cross. Because what I'm trying to do here is not the traditional Christian move of focusing in a nigh-pornographic way on the sufferings of Christ. Mel Gibson has you covered if that's what you want. I want you to imagine specifically what crucifixion felt like to someone who wasn't the Messiah. To someone who was just a schmuck who got caught. And there were a lot of those schmucks: at least 300,000, according to conservative estimates, but maybe as many as two million. After Spartacus' revolt, the Emperor Crassus ordered six thousand of the former gladiator's supporters to be crucified. Kinda puts all those RETVRN memes into some kind of perspective, huh?

Every single one of those people suffered and was humiliated just as much as Jesus, and when we treat the cross as some kind of wand and Jesus as some kind of superhero, we do those people, and Christ Himself, a disservice. Because if you accept the challenge of compassion represented by Matthew 25 - and it's my contention that, as a Christian, you really should - then you have to see every single one of those people as being as worthy of love, honour and empathy as Christ. And when you do that, something becomes very clear. 

The important thing about the crucifixion is not that it was a horrible thing to do to the Son of God. 

The important thing is that it was a horrible thing to do to anyone.