Come on Elaine

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Come on Elaine … this is how it would go

you’d get the email about your son, either dead, or gone, or famous

extremes of an only child, spoiled by two successful parents

likely famous, as he was in childhood, yeah … fat and famous

so now, he’s still not tall and he’s still not thin but he might be

unwrinkled and have lots of kids or … Venereal Disease

he might hate me, i suspect he would

why? Why do i think he’d hate me?

When he was the one who threatened me with a sword

when he was the one who broke the Lalique vase

i suppose because breaking hearts is worse than betrothed glass

though someone, with his desire for the world

i doubt anyone had the power to break his, because words

written by 18-year-old boys on the inside of cassettes of

music for my girl, rarely mean what they say and speak

with their hermaphroditic pricks.

i was older than him in lots of ways

i would have told you Elaine, it wasn’t my intention and yes

you remember us arguing but it wasn’t all me

when he was high, he was really high and

when he was low, he was really low

a sundial beneath the earth

i stayed witnessing, smoking chain after chain

his taking of porn, watching nude and slobbering

as i clamored in my shared insanity, letting him

have his hunger sated in my emptiness.

Well … depravity is depravity and girls who hate themselves

they’re really good at running with that and boys who

like to torture cats

did you know what he did behind that red door Elaine?

did you know what he was really like or just your little boy?

i remember his father once visiting and how

estranged they seemed and he hollered at you like he’d

never stopped not for one minute

and you screamed and screamed and screamed

i remember it because i witnessed it, see i’m not the bad penny

you assumed,  but he might think i am, that’s how our memory works

put her in this box, label it wrong; She’s the reason i got a Second at University

she’s why i didn’t fuck enough,  she’s why i fell out with my really good friends

(who weren’t so really good, if they had those seducing intentions)

and she? Sure, she let his friends do her, like she sold her soul for lasagna

or a slice of wholesome bread with Ganja

God she was always hungry, or purging

and the drugs he gave her, sometimes with prescriptions, sometimes with sweaty palms

sometimes naked on his stomach where his scar, shone like a dalmatian on a fire truck

she half-liked his brown skin and his imperfections, the matted hair, green eyes, short squat pudgy thighs and tiny cock

they didn’t threaten her, they reminded her of a girl

she felt safe even when she felt scared, his hormone injections, wild untamed stare

he said she made him calm, especially when sucking him off to a good record

yeah I bet. Swallowing is harder for those who give head, to narcissistic boys with pretty

circumcision.

Though it’s been so long, she can’t be sure, of what cut what and who bled and who left the door, slightly ajar,

because that was the year she found out she was mad

and he was too, so they sort of worked

though he wasn’t her boyfriend, though he wasn’t her brother, he was a lot of things under the covers

places where they could escape themselves and that eventual horror of knowing

you haven’t got any hinges and the world’s gonna spit you out into the gutter.

Elaine, she could tell you that your son, was actually a surprisingly good lover after she got through showing him how

or she could lie and say; We just watched horror movies, sometimes he posed me

and pricked me, and played, games, with paint and swords

which was also true, because it was all true.

We gorged ourselves, only children without parents who were home

and when you were, you chain smoked too, behind your dust and your exhausted slump

we all did, drinking your wine, eating delivered organic food, such irony Elaine

you think i was just some dumb girl with thin hips and a small brain?

You used to look at me like; Who the fuck do you think you are? And I’d look right back because I wasn’t wearing my glasses and I was fucking the world with my sadness and it really didn’t matter what you thought or what anyone thought, because i’d already decided to jump

and i was watching all the time i was standing there, in my short skirt and my bare legs and my impossible tight breasts and my impossible tight cunt, all of which you hated, because your husband had left you for one

but one isn’t me, and i wasn’t her and she wasn’t it, and you weren’t alone, you were free of him, and he was the reason your son hated you, not me.

I watched through the floor boards, through holes in the ceiling, to your life unpeeling

for your short stubby hands revealing, to the kisses you gave the picture by your reading glasses, to the wine you drank and stained your hands with, before you passed them over yourself in genuflection like a good Catholic and reached for the vibrator

to your son hating you,  as he may have loved you also, why we never quite knew, does anyone? Hate being so close to love, as sex is to horror and horror is to desire.

Elaine, you summoned like a Magi, some kind of anger in him, at a strong mother or women in general, he was a sexist asshole, who liked men who hated women and women who let men hate them and I was a great substitute for Robert Crumbs little busty girls who bent over and let anger take them right up the ass

but he thought anorexic actresses with dark nipples were beautiful and one time i visited his office in Greek Street Soho WI and he was talking to a Jewish actress who i also thought was hot

Rachel Weisz you still are …

and she walked away with her five-inch heels and his eyes up her skirt

i wanted to say what about me? But i was just ordinary despite being an eight to his one, and she was a handsome, famous, adored shiny girl with a full rolodex and you were a tit man

who because you were a man, (though you’d never be a real man and that made you crazy) thought you could, (fuck Rachel Weisz? Seriously?) and you never would, but it was funny imagining, especially when you already had more than you ever would

(with me, the girl of cinders and soot)

so i watched you watching her and later on when you pretended it was her you took

i pretended right back because i wouldn’t mind being her or being you

and if i were her I’d let you split me open four ways like star of anise and divide me back because it’s a soulless game and I’m your whore and i’m your mother and i’m your bloody crack.

I’m sure now you have a young wife and four chubby kids with green eyes

or you might have died, by plunging into a canal, or cutting your throat with a blunt razor

if you’d started to shave after you starred aged ten in Ms Marple as the fat cheeked boy with shorts on and a smart mouth (yeah that was about right)

but either way, i hope you will let me know Elaine, what happened to your son

because i didn’t burn his house down, he did, he struck a match and he lit us both

on fire, until we stopped being repulsive and we stood charred and broken

in Camden Town, not being able to afford to drink, at The Elephant

or fuck each other in your bed, or die standing up right then and there

because burned people are shadows, they persist

in

reminding us

of

them.

I think of him regularly, whilst I’m sure, he has long forgotten me, which isn’t fair and is ironic and really typical, because men operate on a different time and hour. They think of the girl who is bending over now and not the one who did when they first learned to use their magic wand

unless she was obedient at all times and acted the part, in which case they will brag at 45 of the one they did in St. James’s park, who hitched up her skirt and got on all fours, and she was a “right go-er that one,”

Yeah I gave it to her so many times, she couldn’t walk and yeah, yeah, yeah, builders salivating in a pub talk, I guess you had me enough you could, but you’re probably an attorney and that means you like being tied up and debased, and it’s bad taste to talk about women who left you

raw

because you’re in control, you’re the passive one with the fat wallet and the penchant for sex in the afternoon in a diaper, or with a plastic mask over your hair, that you cut when you became serious, so you could hide the scream and the mess of your desperation.

Sometimes I check online to see, if you posted the naked pictures you took when I wasn’t even legal, in your bathroom, where your mom had lots of soap in fancy bottles

whoops

because we both have ruin in our DNA, and Elaine, if you’d asked, I might have slept with you both, your eyes were so lonely and I liked how ruined they were

the extending, unending madness of your family of animals

it comforted me, slowly dawning, I was mad also, I really didn’t know it, until

my

little foot

fit

your

little shoe

that

is.

(First published in Ascendum Magazine 2016).

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Compulsion

I just watched the amazing film Bohemian Rhapsody. Let me ask you something … if I begin this post with; “And I wanted to talk about being gay” How many of you would stop reading? Ask yourselves, what does that really say about you?

I want to talk about being gay. Watching the story of Freddie Mercury it struck me (again) how the tiny minority of people who are gay (not bisexual) still struggle. You may ask why or point to more worthy causes to talk about …

Imagine being 1/2 percent of the population. Maybe you already are. That’s how many women are lesbians and men are roughly 2/3 percent. Bisexuality is far more prevalent, however 85% of women who are bisexual end up married to man, which begs the question, is there such as thing as ‘true’ bisexuality’ or is there just a desire to play both sides until you settle down, invariably with someone of the same gender?

Either way, ‘true’ queer women are rare. For men, those who are bisexual tend to end up being with men. It begs the question – do these stats indicate being a lesbian is not a life style many people choose or want to adopt? Or simply, that most women have a tendency toward heterosexuality as their preference?

My unscientific viewpoint for what it’s worth is; Men who have sex with men tend to be with men maybe because to ‘go there’ is almost indelible? Whereas sexuality for women is more fluid, and whilst they may like having sex with another woman and find her attractive, it’s not enough of a hook. Is sexuality and gayness a preference? I don’t think so, which means the ‘true’ number of gays is smaller than we even credit.

I personally don’t understand why more men are gay than women, as I am biased and see a lot more to be attracted to in a woman than a man (although they are harder to go out with because they are more demanding and selfish and less romantic). Irrespective, a man who is attracted to men, doesn’t go back and forth as much, a woman who is attracted to women may well end up with a man as other considerations come into play. To me, this isn’t being gay – it’s just having fun. Maybe I’m saying being gay is massively different to being bisexual.

I would imagine the negatives about bisexuality are; judgment from both sides, and that’s about it. If you are totally gay then the negatives include persecution, ostracizing, not fitting in, having no role models, no representation and most of all – feeling weird because 99/98 percent of the world doesn’t ‘get’ you and where you are coming from.

How many times have I been told by a woman that they find other women attractive but they can’t really understand wanting to be with a woman for any length of time – interestingly not because of sex, most women like oral sex, but because of the high maintenance being with a woman entails and how nice it is when a man romances you. It is true, it’s rarer and finding it with a woman, well you often end up having to do all the work and while men are good at that, women aren’t as much.

Hence why of those relationships that last, the classical butch/femme roles tend to work out best because the lesbians who are butch want to imitate a man and romance the woman and the femme is happy. I realize that’s a negative stereotyping of female-female relationships but there is also some truth.

Thinking about the AIDS era (which has never entirely left us and now that there are new drugs that people can take to reduce their likelihood of HIV exposure, where’s the incentive to continue to practice safe sex?) and how many gay men (and others) died and the terrible things that were said about them and how generations exist now that know nothing of this and how it will be forgotten …

I remember I was very young but I heard people say things like; “AIDS is killing the queers its divine justice” That told me early on that gay people were not equal and would never be treated equally behind closed doors. At one point in my life I was in the closet because it was easier and unlike a person of color, a gay person can often be in the closet to avoid prejudice. I’d not been in the closet before and suddenly I was privy to the things straight people said about gays when they didn’t think one of them was listening. I realized that this had all been said of me when I wasn’t in the closet but behind my back.

Then the other aspect to consider is the gay community and how judging and excluding it can be and how for many queers, fitting in with their own gay ‘family’ doesn’t always come easy or at all. I personally tend not to get on with gays, I have found them to often possess the worst traits of heterosexuals which deeply disappoints me. Lesbians judge you for not being queer enough, or act like swaggering men. Gay men can be such divas that they own the sarcasm and bitchiness in the room.

Does it mean you’re a ‘bad’ queer if you don’t feel in with ‘your people’? And yet … why assume just because you share one thing in common, you’ll get along? I’m sure I share something in common with Trump as well … point made.

The female gay world is divided into sections, either you’re a successful, educated career person in which case you go to exclusive things and judge those who are not on your level. You only date those who are like you, and you have high expectations as well as demanding those women you date are athletic, social and above all, status and financially successful.

The other group are the more neighborhood based gays, and the clubs teem with liars, frauds and fakes alongside players, druggies and alcoholics. If you imagine being heterosexual and reducing the number of options you have from roughly 48% to 1/2% you probably wouldn’t find someone you liked either. And let’s for not forget, if you’re straight and you see someone in the street or anywhere, you can essentially flirt with them without fear. But how can you tell when someone may be gay? Contrary to popular opinion, the gay-dar doesn’t work THAT well. So you are further restricted to mind-reading, falling in love with heterosexuals or going to gay clubs where the worst reside.

Boo Hoo right? A hard life. But not nearly as hard as many others. Combine that with a co-morbidity of higher rates of depression/anxiety (no wonder) and all the accompanying aspects that may accompany homosexuality and a life time of being shamed, ridiculed, the odd one out, and it’s not simply one issue, it’s everything.

There have been times I wished fervently not to be gay. I got fed-up of having a crush on my straight friend who wouldn’t like me if I were the last person standing, I saw how well men can treat women, I envied the heterosexual world. That’s why being gay is no choice, as most who had one, wouldn’t choose it.

That said it’s not all negative. Some of the best parts of my life have been as a result of being gay. Watching the film on Freddie Mercury really affected me profoundly because it reminded me that only a few years ago in my city there were stickers condemning gays having the right to marry, that my own life has been severely disrupted/destroyed for several reasons related to being gay, and how many gays have suffered over the years.

I may not be a huge fan of this modern world – 2018 onward – and I may hark beck to ‘better’ eras as I perceive them, BUT I know things are improving for gays and I hope one day, being gay is not something that will pull you down and give you pain. It will be what it is meant to be, a natural minority who see things differently but are in every other way part of us all.

Spare a thought for gays even as you think they have all their rights now and should stop complaining. It is not as simple as possessing rights. Gays are still more likely to commit suicide, have addictions, mental illness, be ostracized from family and be beaten up and murdered. Gays can often be very isolated, their pain not taken seriously, and feel alone even among ‘their kind’ and it really does make a difference to us when someone, irrespective of gender, befriends us and likes us for who we are, without being uncomfortable around us.

A friend for a gay person has twice the value because we never take it for granted and we always feel so lucky. After all, most of us living, remember a time when admitting you were gay would guarantee nobody would be your friend. Therefore, thank you for all who show kindness to us, and remember, compassion is the only thing that compensates for the erstwhile damage human beings have historically wrought, both on minorities of all kinds and our planet.

I dream of a world where it will be okay to walk down the street and not worry about holding hands with the person you love, when it will be comfortable to kiss someone you’re with, in public, without fearing being beaten up. Just as women worldwide, dream of walking down a street without being raped. I believe this day can come, if all of us have the patience to see the value of talking about this and not saying ‘I’m so fed up with the gay agenda or the feminist agenda’ and switching off. Until we have true equality, the only thing we can do is bring awareness and hope in turn, it produces change.

Oh, and to those bisexuals? Yeah. Sorry. But on the other hand, I’ve got a point. Can’t you sometimes choose the girl? 😉

Go see Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s incredible.

Breaking rules

Yeah.

Maybe I am that cliche

you warned your friends about

wasn’t it you? Huddled together at the bar

watching me

I could easily say you wanted a piece

but I’m classier than that

instead, leave it up to you to assume

a girl who likes girls would like

YOU

I worked hard at being

the opposite of your cliche

you think I didn’t know how it was?

babysitting watching parents watching me

wondering without saying, what they were thinking

written in bubbles above their heads

do lesbians abuse children as well?

I have spent a life time

hands off

not looking too long

(incase they assume, and it is an assumption)

not touching

(incase they think, oh she’s giving me a sign)

not being myself

because I had to be careful of your

wrong thoughts

it wasn’t me who gave you cause

like any rumor you didn’t need much, to believe

all girls who liked girls, would like you and might

stalk you or leap on you unprovoked

and how many times did I want to write

YOU WISH

in large letters above your bed

because you couldn’t earn my desire

if you spent the rest of your life running

I’m not any different to you and I’m totally different to you

because I don’t rent my emotions by the hour

don’t fall for every girl just because I like girls

the opposite is true

there have been so very few

my heart is a squeezed lemon

shy and closed

that is until you broke the mould

and became the very thing I’d always been afraid of

a woman I wanted, on the other side

so yeah….

now finally you can tilt your glass and say

I am that cliche

all you who mocked and made me blush

at being myself

it’s finally true, I fell for a girl who couldn’t

return my gaze

that’s the downside of being a lesbian for sure

once in a long while you fall for a straight girl

who just ruins your rule book

Find me

By the morning I will have

come back

you say doitnowyeahbaby and I

used to dream of cutting out my female parts

and chopping my long hair into a ladder

with my bound breasts crimson and my writhe

locked behind metal

would you still seek to

turn the key in my neck and bend me

over you like a bottle of glue

the top fallen off making a mess

of our independence from each other

there exists

a chimera

in your belly and

she tells you to put the lipstick on thick

and wear your bra too tight

but don’t open the door to strangers

they might punish the boy who liked

pills and girl clothes and painting

vaginas on his daydreams

you ask me, can’t you fill me up

with your anger? And I say I don’t have what it takes

the plastic strap-on kind doesn’t feel real and you say

what’s real anymore and so I act the boy

and you mince and squirm beneath me

almost for a moment I get excited by your

pretend curves and your thrown neck

but there is always a glimmer of masculine

about you and the wet tears of a girl in

my feeble attempts

we are swapped back again

sitting outside in matching jeans

some boy comments on my pretty bosom

and I can see the pain in your

envy as you tuck

your skirt in your throat

and hide the longing

once more

 

This is for my friends who are transforming from one gender to another. You are not alone.

Polemic

A polemic once

mapped the world and

chambers of the heart

declaring

men love men three percent proof

and women love women

once or never

It explained the empty feeling in the bars

girls playing boys hitting balls into green pockets

It explained why gay men swelled in number

disco fever, why did they smell so much better?

is it nature or nurture?

testosterone in the womb or green enchiladas?

is it birth order or red hair?

left-handedness or playing Barbie too long with your sisters?

was it the color purple or your best friend Michael

showing each other what you had beneath the lilac tree

screaming and shouting FRANKFURTER!

at the top of your lungs

running as fast as you could

a natural instinct

the adults

drinking Pims Number One

look up briefly with reddened lips

boys will be boys

and girls will be girls

they nod all-knowing

knowing nothing

of the sum and the handspan

found only in the dial and fragile turn

of wonder

Anything seems possible

Eating peanut butter always reminds me of the night a gay man tried to seduce me

the irony is I never ate peanut butter until I became American

nor did I have any gay male friends

they thought me too girly with my waist-length hair, frilly frocks and high socks

an object easier for ridicule, there are status levels of coolness I didn’t care about

because I didn’t fit in with their ideas just as they were not

societies chosen children

it seemed a shame two outcasts wouldn’t bridge the gap

but Rick did, he was he said, a Bear in the gay world

what does that mean? I wanted to know

it’s a kind of look he said

there are others, like geek, school boy, father

why must you have labels when society already forces them?

maybe that’s why we do, he said and looked sad

which was an unusual thing because he laughed all the time

you know what they say about comedians and how

they make others laugh because inside they hurt

and he was left handed-too like me

maybe he did resemble a bear

 

so when I sat on his lap in the bar and he whispered

the feel of you is driving me crazy

I gave him a double-look

those words can’t be coming from you

I thought I was safe on a queer man’s knee

you’re not safe on any man’s knee in this country he said

we’re no longer in France and it’s not du rigor

all men want sex, gay men may be gay but they still

sometimes take to bed the occasional woman

I hadn’t known that

the lesbian world was more rigid with thick rule books

and tightly closed legs

it was hard enough to sleep with another woman

lesbian-bed-death and all

but men? A few who couldn’t get pregnant with turkey-basters

fell in love with their male donors

but only on a full moon

and whilst I made no habit of sitting on men’s knees usually

the bar was heaving with sweating twenty year olds

and he was gay and I was gay and everyone should be gay and do a little dance

except I was sad and lonely and Rick complained that

men down the leather bar thought 30 was old so he feared

the day when he would be irrelevant and nobody would desire

his gentle paunch and diminishing hairline

I told him that day will never come you matter to me

and we both saw how we filled each others needs

better than someone of the same-sex ever could

which seemed a painful irony

I might have drunkenly slept with him if I didn’t

already know he’d been promiscuous

and I am a responsible child of the AIDS era and

not fond of navigating awkward mornings

he might have slept with me the way a lonely boy

finds a hole in any surface

to release the places he keeps hidden

then we wouldn’t have been friends

and that would have been the last time

I’d sat on a boys knee, queer or straight

so I wouldn’t have seen you on stage performing or

your ex girlfriend staring at you with open-mouth desire

when she was supposed to be courting me

that night I learned a little about people

I would have understood less from the back of the room

forgetting the advantages of the heterosexual girl

smoking a black cigarette and knocking back my gloom

for minority status isn’t all about being different

it can be the loneliest place in the world

and even dyed in the wool queers

have fantasies about knights, princes and castles

when the room is dark and oily

and anything seems possible