What is the meaning of this, McKenna?

I've been posting my NaPoWriMo poems here almost as an afterthought to posting them on my Facebook notes page. This is largely because, between work and gigging, most of these poems have been written quite late at night. Now, with it being Sunday, the Easter weekend, family visited, gifts given and received, I have a little time to provide a little context and explanation. I'll try not to make it sound too much like the dissertation accompanying a Creative Writing portfolio.

(I attended a lecture on feminist psychoanalysis at university where the lecturer explained she had used up her allowance of film clips in other lectures, and would instead have to resort to saying 'cunt' [for entirely good feminist reasons] in order to shock us out of our undergraduate slumber. I'm no good at embedding film clips in blog posts, but I'll try to avoid saying 'cunt' as much as possible.)

Mirror, mirror - nothing to do with the film which is out at the moment, aside from the allusion to the Wicked Queen in the title. The prompt for the first day of NaPoWriMo was 'carpe diem' - the example given was Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'. I was in a pretty low mood at the time - I've just started a new run of laser sessions after a loooooong, unintended hiatus, and was getting a bit annoyed waiting for the hair to fall out. I found myself thinking that I wished I'd carped my diem a lot earlier with regard to transitioning. So I started the month on a nice down note. Go me!

Way Down - The prompt for day two was to write a poem inspired by the song at Number One on your birthday - tracked down using this site. Turned out that was 'Way Down' by Elvis Presley, which I've never heard. However I am familiar with Tori Amos' song 'The Way Down', from her album 'Boys for Pele', and this is basically a song about listening to that. Bit of a minor piece, but it's in the nature of the challenge that not everything you come out with will be brilliant.

Not the Royal Wedding (I'm Sure) - day three's prompt was to write an epithalamium, or wedding poem. So I wrote about what I and my friend Katie did on the day of the wedding of Good Prince Bill and Duchess Katie Godblessherhasnthersistergotanicearse, which was go out in the gay village of Newcastle and find the thing a complete bust. The village is pretty desperate at the best of times (well, that's my bridges with the Newcastle LGBT scene burned...) but up until we got to The Yard, by which point we were too tired and emotional to enjoy things, everywhere was dead. It's not really about the Royal Wedding, of course (hence the title, which is also a hangover from the Tori poem on day two, 'Not the Red Baron' being another Pele song); in fact, to my surprise, I found what I'd written was essentially a poem about trans exclusion from cis LGB spaces. If it's not too big-headed to say it, I'm quite proud of this one.

Scrawl from a Blue Room - this was a raid on my morning pages, basically hacked out to hit the one-poem-a-day deadline. The title was basically a cynical attempt to find some way of relating the piece to that day's suggestion of writing a twelve-bar blues, a challenge I opted not to take up, being entirely too much of a bluestocking to write blues. I said, I'm too much of a bluestocking to write me some blues. Couldn't write me no twelve-bar blues even if I choose, uh-huh, no way, no how, yeah.

Catflaps at Dawn - another morning pages raid. This day's prompt was 'openings', which functions here on two levels, obviously: catflaps are openings and dawn is the opening of the day. Do you see? Yeah. I'm geet clever like, me.

The Imp of the Perverse - the prompt was to write about animals. I chose to write about Animal from the Muppets. About halfway through the poem I thought it might have been cooler to write about Hawk and Animal from the Road Warriors/Legion of Doom, but by that point I'd committed. I may still write the Hawk 'n' Animal poem, though. I just need to decide if I include Rocco or not.

The Peculiar Beauty of Meat is a line that Francis Bacon used on occassion to explain the very carnal, brutal content of his pictures. This poem, based on yesterday's prompt to write a poem where everything is the same colour, seemed to be a good fit with that expression, not least because it references Bacon's 'Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion' and his series of screaming Popes inspired by Velasquez. There are also references in here to Louis Bunuel's film 'Un Chien Andalou', Diamanda Galas (la carne maccelata, 'the butcher's meat' is a line from her song 'Sono l'Antichristo') and, yes, Tori again.

And most recently, Big Fat Love Poem. I had a bit more time to write today, so started on this one before the prompt went live. It's another morning pages raid, based on a little stream-of-consciousness written after seeing an awesome-looking fat girl on the bus to work. It should, of course, go without saying that we lesbians never objectify other women sexually, not at all, not at all. So this poem is, of course, about my admiration of the way she defied patriarchal conventions of beauty. Yes. Of course. *serious lesbian feminist face*.

So, anyway, that's the context for the outpouring of poems below. If I have time next week, I'll include commentary underneath each poem when I copy it up here. For any I don't manage to include commentary for, well, join me for another catch-up post next week!

NaPoWriMo Poem Eight: Big Fat Love Poem

Fat: the apples on a cheek, the fake smile
gone Duchenne as you brush blusher.
A perfectly round ass in blue cotton sweatpants,
green hoodie clinging, riding up in places.

The shape of your red hair framing
the face that I can't see:
full lips glossed pink, a rounded nose,
eyes made up, but gravid as if opened

just this moment. Freckled, dimpled. Flushed.
A glimpse of shining flesh between
the waistband and the jacket hem,
the inward curve from hip to spine

a valley to be measured, arching
warm and soft beneath the tracing fingers.
A room to be in on our own,
space and light enough to see and feel,

the arc of hands, the shiver in the flesh,
the quickening breath, senses, beings fused;
your curves, the muscle sheathed beneath
your fat. Perfection. Fulness. Plenitude.

NaPoWriMo Poem Seven: The Peculiar Beauty of Meat

The city burns. The engines race
without much hope. Our skin, soot-speckled,
dusted with the ash of others, shows where
it shows as molten as a furnace.

The cloth is offered to the bull,
the thinnest blade withdrawn from the hide.
The muscle makes a sucking noise and then
what was beneath begins to trickle forth.
The razor blade is slicing up the eye.

The neon lights the smoking woman's body.
Each inhalation reignites the tiny sun
decaying to a point between her fingers.
The gangs of men who roar outside the window
take on its hue as veins in temples throb,
boozy blood cells rushing
to the head and other parts.

The creature at the cross' foot is screaming,
like the Pope, like the monochrome mother,
like la carne maccelata,
like a Krakatoa sunset,
like what flows in a Whitechapel gutter,
like the girl who pounds the keys,
like the blood I'll never bleed,
like the police cars burning through the long hot summer

NaPoWriMo Poem Six: The Imp of the Perverse

Rock,
pink dreadlocks,
a gammadon of canneloni arms playing
the drums like a hurricane,
a Hindu Keith Moon, with free reign

to
come and screw
up any regularly scheduled sketch
with the freedom of the antic wretch
to, without permission, fetch

up
in any set-up
and deconstruct it, growling just his name,
disregarding all rules of the game:
maximum soul, Animal, unchained, untamed!

NaPoWriMo Poem Five: Catflaps at Dawm

Technically they call it morning twilight,
astronomical, civil or nautical
depending on what can and can't be seen:
landmarks, the larger stars, or the horizon.

I tip the cat food, wet and dry,
into two bowls and fill a third with water.
There were nights, not all that long ago,
when I wouldn't be in bed yet at this hour:

all-night pseudo-raves in Student Unions,
caning ice-pops and still water,
fellating Chupa-Chups as much
for sugar-rush as sexual suggestion,

dancing solo in the dub room,
sinuous and feline in my head,
heavy liquid bassy spaces
breaking out the girl.

Summer fruit juice, waiting,
in the Nibelheim beneath the shopping mall,
for the first bus of the morning.
A bump. The catflap opens.

NaPoWriMo Poem Four: Scrawl from a Blue Room

Come here. It's time for your lesson.
You've taught us well, but it's your time to learn.
How it feels to be afraid. To be unwanted.
How it feels to be the bottom of the pile.

How it feels to hear every day
that we only matter when we're making trouble,
when one of you has to take one of us out
and your media blowhards make him out the hero.

We're here to teach you what it's like
to be made to feel your only worth
consists in meeting sales objectives
to keep some reptile yank in what he calls suspenders.

You're her to learn how we resist,
and we have to, as much as you hate it
because the fact that we resist reminds
you what you do is genocide.

Lower status monkeys die off quicker.
Lower status civil servants
are the first to clutch their chests.
Did you know that? I suspect you do.

You're a gunman who can't look along the barrel
but you never miss because it's point-blank range.
And you pull the trigger countless times each day:

When you ignore the girl who makes your morning latte.
When you treat the person on the helpdesk line
like a punchbag made of air. A service drone,
non-human, a passive bin for all your scrunched-up hatred.

Every back-slapping, bigoted joke you guffaw at
with your gang of mates at the end of the bar,
loud enough the quiet, bourbon-drinking girl
hears every word.

It's an epidemic you create. A genocide
of strokes, infarctions, self-inflicted cuts.
Immune responses going limp. You made this.
And you profit from it. And we're not supposed to fight?

NaPoWriMo Poem Three: Not the Royal Wedding (I'm Sure)

Bright sun and almost empty bars.
The sofas tattered: no lights in the toilet
where, by Blackberry flash, I applied
just lipstick and mascara, plus
the powder from the compact you'd discarded.

The extra holiday meant buses coming later.
Few were out yet. Those who were, were loud:
braying white cis gay guys. Such a bunch
of personalities we found another bar.
I thought of London, the siesta-silence of a Soho pub
shattered by a wanna-thesp whose voice dripped privilege,
declaiming 'CUNT!' as if two pints had made him Withnail.

We figured we'd see less guys in the Dog.
We were right: just us, two more dykes and the barmaid.
Paint-stripper techno drowning conversation.
More women entered. Nine or ten. A crowd!
I kept my head down, scared of being made
by rads, or, worse, knocked back for looking rough.

Switch was even emptier. A whole bar
to yourself falls short of what's expected,
especially when the Guinness comes in cans.
We drifted leftwards, one more for the road,
and found the only place with something like a party.
Too tired to dance, to weak to fight for seats
with drag queens dressed like Kate and Pippa,
we finished up, hugged awkwardly,
went home to news of cleared squats
and burned-out Tesco Metros.