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.