Horsehead

This is a performance/spoken piece in response to Jordaan Mason’s Divorce Lawyers, I Shaved My Head; an album related to our breakup in the way-back-when. If you aren’t familiar with Jordaan’s work, I highly recommend you check it out.

I once dressed like a man for you to prove how wrong it was.
Those images now so stained with semen, so preserved,
I wonder bodies electricity static and who will turn the lights off
when we hide in bed so afraid of being seen for flesh?
Years later, have I ever told you how afraid I am of the horses?

I was one of those poor girls, wildly gendered and misunderstood;
so studied, so indecipherable; all inference in corybantic war.
Your wild eyes, your jism drying on my back, your passivity;
that quiet wild war held between bodies in fervent friction.
You could never know I was just a scared child.
You could never know I had never touched a horse before.
You could never know how those reserved, furious eyes could frighten me so.
An animal so animal, when stables are stocks and neckties are nooses.

What the Vivian sisters forgot was their own animal alliances:
the raven, the stars, ursus majora, the snake, one each her own.
My own were lost in the war, the foxes are buried below the earth
and the Morrigan fled with what was left of my agency.
All that is left are the horses, the horses and You that fascinated creature.

Isn’t it clear?
You’re no midwife!
At best, a reluctant husband, a tenant,
you held my hand when my hand needed holding
and I pushed and pushed and when I cried I cried heavy tears
so heavy, and so heavy I carried them with me
you tried to tug them out of me while I dreamed of dying
and when we showered after, i celebrated in that scalding firehose,
hoping that skin would slip from skin
and I could catch a glimpse of the animal underneath you.

I cut off all of my hair. It wasn’t so that you would love me again – I knew you loved me and I loved you and we would never be able to love each other again. All that time I loved you I was shearing off locks of tinder so we could find warmth in those cold places. And you documented. And you sang me songs, you sang, “She slipped out, I don’t know how” and I
feigned a smile because I was so in love with you that hurt didn’t matter.

It was so cold. I was so cold I was so alone. You sang songs about my my cock while a kilometer away I drank until I couldn’t stand up and considered castration. I wonder still if you know how close we came to death that ugly warring winter. I wonder if we ever took off our animal masks and looked each other in the eye even once. I wonder if we children knew what love looked like, that ghastly shape; I wonder if the war ended or if instead we simply took on new meaning.

Will it I love you. Will it the Vivian sisters stop singing for the stars.
This is all that I have in my hands; I want to forget who I am.
This is all that I have in my hands; I want to fuck and forget who I am.
This is all that I have in my hands; how do we get warm?

There are three instances in the past year in which someone found my blog by searching “feminist teratology”.

Dear three people I don’t know: I want to gamarry you.

Transgender, Trans-genre; or, Stop Writing Like Normal People and Queer Shit Up

    The influence of the last few hundred centuries or so has created a rigidity that is just aching to be smashed. Sexism, racism, classism, ableism et al – all are products of a society that we seek to obliterate. In literature we combat this totality through polemic, non-fiction, the heart-wrenching memoir, the essay, the thinly-veiled allegory, the ‘zine – any genre manipulated correctly can stand as sharp as a sword against oppression. But what about genre? What of the parameters of the written word itself?
    I’ll use as an example the overbearing standard of heterosexuality. In an unquestionably patriarchal, monogamous and sexist society there are queers resisting heterosexual hegemony at every turn. We create our own parameters for relationships; experimenting with gender, sexuality, kink; finding new ways to come together and new ways to fuck with every new day. There are those homosexuals who assimilate in to the norm to seek safe passage through the depths of hatred and violence. There are those transsexuals who reject the queering of gender and stick to the harsh rigidity of patriarchy. We queers are no better than those who choose to assimilate – we simply have more fun in liberation, fucking who and how we wish, unencumbered by the totality that surrounds us.
    This spirit of experimentation, of confrontation, of liberation envelops our lives. So why doesn’t it proliferate in to the ways we write about ourselves?
    Here is what I have to say: the injunction of genre on our narratives prevents true expression of what it is to be othered in contemporary society.
    We have missed the golden age of experimental queer literature. The early Soviets were hosting orgies and creating plays that expanded the definition of performance while questioning place, time, and objectivity. Gertrude Stein was reinventing language with a brilliant tenacity. William S. Burroughs raised vile faggotry to a fine art. Jean Genet was crafting prosaic smut with one hand on his pen and the other wrapped around his cock. It was a time that the subversion of queerness permeated the text. The walls of genre, and even language itself, were being broken down and recreated to suit the needs of the writer. In time the fashion passed – a generation of queers paving the way for another wave that isn’t there.
    What happened to the fantastical? The violent? The vile smut? The reformation of language to suit the needs of the writer? In a capitalist market where all that matters is getting the books off of the shelves and experimentation is frowned upon in favor of something familiar and easily accessible, it’s difficult enough for a queer to get published – let alone a queer with a radically different perspective on what literature should look like. The queer writer is (with few exceptions) relegated to a minimal number of acceptable genres. The heart-felt transition memoir. The sanitized love story. The witty, watered down essay. The semi-autobiographical slice-of-life novel. The barriers of style and genre press down on us, forcing out one bowdlerized voice perverting the vox populi of those perverts yearning for an outlet.
    This filtering of queer and trans voices leaves many writers unable to experiment or find true expression. The question that comes with every novel written is, “but will it sell?” With our voices already so silenced, our lives already so overburdened with the weight of the totality, the only stories that get squeezed out are the pablum we’re so exhausted of.
    This is a call to queer and trans writers everywhere: don’t leave your radical notions, unceasingly experimental drives, and your habit of questioning everything set before you get left behind in the bedroom. We need you. Transcend gender? Transcend genre. Experiment. Masturbate all over the page and see what comes out. Share your intimate writing processes with a loved one. I want orgiastic novels with more authors than there are chapters. I want filthy smut with wild queers fucking in the face of the insurrection. I want brilliant texts that redefine language and break down genre. I want to break that impermeable wall between poetry and prose. Create the market. Get published. Find new ways of production and distribution. I want Queer Literature to have its own section in the library. I want to see the kind of innovation, active imagination and redefinition in queer households across the world to harness that power and wrangle it in to the written word.
    Create new ways to express yourself. Trust your instincts. Refuse to be pigeonholed. Write.

what is what

I haven’t updated this blog in quite a while. Here is the story: my head is still pretty fucked and it looks like I’m going to be getting ECT. My entire life has been wrapped up in recovery and there isn’t really much else going on. My dog’s alright. My computer automatically spellchecks in Russian so every single word is underlined in red when I use English. I haven’t written anything in months. That is what.

for ravin

Dearest dead friend, I mean what i say:
in our lives thru havoc and hope;
    blood and alcohol,
    chocolate and cinder,
    scars of novels and revolt
you reached out thru the riptide of calamity,
    grasped my wrist, and pulled hardest of them all.

My lungs half-full, I am left knowing that
    i would have drowned were it not for you.
For we hit stride in the same strokes,
    our common current binding, defining,
    shaping our bodies, erosion wearing us away,
    pulling us further from the shallows in to depths
        our mothers never wanted to see us reach.
I remember a shore, once, the safety of coral,
    you would read in bed and i would read to you;
    when drugs kept us sharp and our bodies kept us warm.
I remember safety, once, knowing you.

No cartographer, no mathematician,
i am pulling out all of my maps:
    atlases of scars, my compass, pictures of you,
 looking north south east and west,
moving the minutes back and forth on my watch,
looking and looking, looking for you where did you go?

Thru all of my charts, catalogues of the water
    we seemed to know so well, so deep –
what ravine, in to what trench? What pulled you down?
Where do you go now? Where do i?
And which is safer –
    these calamitous shores
        or those calming, seeping depths?
I miss you i miss you i miss you,
    when will you be coming home?
    
You are a ray, a geometric ray:
your beginning is fixed – then,
even thru catastrophe or death,
whether you go on or your breath fails you;
thru the life you take in and take, you are infinite.

                                          3 April 2013

everything is

everything is fantasy, all is sharp;

everything is brilliant and ethereal,

what is oh everything, yes,

everything is.

just when

i just know and I feel this body worry when, what,

what will I know before then; and it’s never enough,

and so it’s so; goodbye, daily, goodbye.