Writing Ourselves Whole

"Liberty is the right not to lie." - Camus via Califia

A blog about sexual healing, erotic writing, and the transformative power of words.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Pretty

This is one of my writes from last night's workshop -- the prompt was Sarah Vaughan's rendition of "I feel pretty."

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I infrequently feel pretty. When I first came out fem, I had fantasies about being the movie girl in front of the vanity, soft lights behind me and brash up front, makeup and brushes and atomizers of perfume splayed all around on dresser-top ready for spritzing, dusting, lining, pearling: being That Girl.

In real life, I can't habituate that girl, can't hold her down and climb into her skin, and, more to the point, i can't wait around for her to get dressed and done enough to daintyfoot herself into my skin. I have other things to do.

I've ached to be the pretty girl, the coquette, the charming klutz with the open face that guys -- and then butches -- just couldn't help but fall into. But then, in real life, I was more interested in being one of the guys, which is sort of the opposite of pretty girl -- isn't it? -- unless maybe you're a Queen, and then when I say "guys," I mean it ironically.

I put pretty on sometimes, but even then I keep ragged and rough and mussed and so pretty looks more like trashy, which I'm a lot more comfortable with. I idolize pin-up girl glamour and couldn't in a million years sit around in front of a fucking mirror every day long enough to get that glass-like gussied, just to hoof it right into a mud puddle and then whine about getting scuffed. I prefer glamour that's already ready to be smeared, that shows the true meanings of the word, glamour: a spell, witchery; glamour that lets the flaws, the real, through: shows unplucked chin and moustache beneath glitter and dark bands of eyeliner.

But these things do not make pretty. Pretty has a fragility to it that I just can't hold myself to, am unwilling to always be (yes, Ani) the kitten who needs rescuing, the one who won't eat for fear of stains, the one who won't run 'cause her shoes or skirt are too tight -- I am forever running pantyhose instead, and tearing fabric so I have a better range of motion.

What if we recalibrated pretty? But why should we, when so many other words fit better: smart, dirty, mouthy, unfettered, dangerous, roguish (yes, thank you, for a fem), calculating, powerful, aware, articulate, strong -- what if all of these are places of power for that which has been relegated to the land of pretty?

What if pink got to hold its full blood history again? The color of healing scars, of early arousal, of the just inseam of bared teeth: pink is not a dainty thing. Pink is the early blood, the foreshadowing, the heather of orchids.

I claim my right not to be pretty, to take interesting and exotic with pride, to swelter into the other labels of an engaged and cracked femininity laced with a boyness I just can't let go of all the way, not after I got so accustomed to its weight and musk after so many years -

I could do pretty when I was a boy, absolutely get all the transfags who mince into pretty as their finally due, who get to hold its danger in their hands and on their face now. Pretty boys make me want to squeal, 'cause they're dangerous, they walk with pretty and a dagger all at the same time, all hands on deck: pretty is never something for a boy to aspire to, and must always be wiped clean -- we fight for what we're not supposed to have.

I want to give any unworn pretty to these boys and their welterweight badness, learn something about the precision of desire and naming, learn something about the audacity we all require to wear our pink and chewy hearts on our sleeves.

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Thursday, September 3, 2009

" At nearly 40, you are finally learning about friendship"

(One of our prompts at the Art for Recovery writing group last week was this: “you wake one morning and you are expecting…” (from "The Crows," Evelyn Fitzpatrick)

You wake one morning and you are expecting to believe again, to fall into the foreshadowing that the dreams brought into you, or you into. You remember the doves, the way they carried you, and the pelican’s dipping heads, feeding under your feet, and how you walked over the water til you got to the other side of the lake, and to nearly dry land, where you sat back and cried because you were exhausted, desiring, and hadn’t noticed your ability to talk on water while you were doing it, you just needed to get somewhere, and now that you’re there, you know with out trying that the capacity has left your feet.

You poke one toe at the water and it sinks beneath the surface. Minnows startle away like dreams, like longings, like small children—you remember, after waking, the streaks of water down your cheeks and, too, how the surface of the lake undulated with a presence beneath your soles, like no surface you’d ever before encountered    but it felt so normal all the wile you were crossing the lake       what had you needed to get to? Why couldn’t you pay attention?

You think you remember – the way dreams come back unbidden, like childmemory – something having to do with a good friend and a loss, a declaration or a poem you had to deliver       but mostly you just wanted to get to her. She was mourning, and you knew about mourning, how so often it goes and rides through you, us, without words – and how you wanted o sit next to her, and she was, you knew, on the far side of the lake from where you’d begun, and the lake was long, unbearably so, and you’d known, in the dream, it would take too long to go around, something would break in her during the time you were being a good and dutiful; boy or girl citizen and walking barefoot the long way ‘round       and so you rolled up your cuffs just slightly because you didn’t want to be entirely unpresentable when you got to her and you strode out onto the surface of those tidal silty waters. You could have swum, you suppose, but it hadn’t exactly occurred to your dream self to do so       when you get to the other side (not of the lake, but of the dream, after you wake) the day is coolwarm and the dream air around you, back in there, was salty-kelpy, smelled like worms and cormorant feathers and exhaust fumes. When you wake up, you wondered why no one else seemed surprised that you were walking on the water – and that no one joined you. In the dream, you were alone on the other side, you sat down on a rock wall built by laborers fifty years ago to keep the lake’s banks from eroding, and you leaned back onto your hands and you wept with a kind of thick longing. You woke up, still catching the sobs in your sleep-riddled throat, and you brought your waked hands up to your face to feel if it was wet there. It wasn’t, but that didn’t quite convince you you hadn’t been crying –

You knew this dream was something to do with faith and the enormity of friendship, the clotting that friendlove will let you do, how a deep trust in someone who knows you, knows even the things you think you hide, the person with whom you have failed most indelibly and still they hold their arms open to you, the deep trust of settling into letting that love be a part of your life and wanting to return it, makes miracles flow from the tips of your fingers, solidifies even the most liquid thing, makes liquid, too, the rocks and boulders with which you’ve cluttered your heart. All you had meant to do in the dream was get to your friend where you knew she sat alone next to a live oak tree on a greening hillside near the lake and keened for what she had lost, sit your body next to hers and let her keep on howling – just not alone. You wanted to be the hand she could grab onto if she needed one, you wanted to be some ears she could pour story into if she was ready, you wanted only for your body to be there, next to her body, both your fractured human lives embedded into the earth and inextricably into one another’s hearts.

At nearly 40, you are finally learning about friendship, about a kind of love that has not sex at its core but something more substantial, less malleable, something you don’t have words for, something you can’t bribe into or out of place, something you can’t control – and that realization, that without your manipulating it or wheedling it or flirting it, someone loves you in all of your flawed entirety, even still, at your waking time here in your post-good-dream bed, brings you back up to tears, opens you to gratitude, bleeds you toward hope.

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Wednesday, August 26, 2009

'under a genderqueering microscope'

The more comfortable I get with my girlhood, after seriously striving to embody masculinity for almost a decade, the less able I am to describe it -- girlhood -- with any kind of precision: Well, a girl's a female-bodied person, unless she's male-bodied, and she likes dresses and pink unless she hates them and prefers skinned knees and tree climbing or none of the above or all. Well, it's clear, isn't it, that the girl's the softer one, right? Except I've stroked some pretty soft boys -- and met girls rocked hard like stone and the girls are the ones who cry right except when they don't and the boys do and I'm done with layering on description and definition: femininity likes frills and adornment and paint and frivolity up to and until and unless and and it digs its unpainted nails into thick rocky soil or, yes, knows perfectly well how to turn a phrase between a girl's or a boi's legs and sings its songs with abandon until and unless it remains silent.

There's no sure thing about femininity and masculinity for me anymore -- not about either except in the know-it-when-i-see-it sorts of ways and even that is all up for interpretation and assumption, those kinds of grabs. The things that say boys are strong and girls get carried have never seen me (or you, or him, or hir) carry a box of books wearing four-inch heels and who cares if its girl or not except

I do. I thicken into the femininity my stepfather wrought for me, the tough bitch smart broad high femme ball buster prima donna that he was always just the right man for: it's that last part, of course, that leaves me nauseous, that wrote me into boyhood, into all the masculinity I'd always already carried, all my life -- they just called it tomboy but I took it out of my back pocket, fluffed it out, slicked it on and called that leather jacket and jeans and boots and shorn shorn head strong and safe

girlhood was the stuff that smeared his palms and yes, greased his chin, and I wanted to get myself far away from the staining thing that I had been. I drove a straight sharp line down between butch and femme, masculine and feminine, girl and boy and always I meant to bend myself toward the unlayerable side, unbreakable side, unbroad side, ungirl side. 'Cause boy is always and only not girl, right? We can say that at least for sure,

right?

Not in the world I come from, the dancers I live within, who question every frilly tail-marker under a genderqueering microscope. Some boys will be boys and girls will be women but other girls stripe their butts with Marilyn Monroe panties and dance on the stage with barbells in each hand and some boys like to bend at the waist when they sob or lay open to the receiving they were never supposed to want and all the lists of what's feminine and what's masculine just ends up being make believe or stereotype for me now, jogging my memory around what the folks outside the Bay Area Bubble say is good for gooses and ganders. It's longing for play I frill into, glitter that doesn't stain the eye and a kind of strong-fisted handshake that makes a grown butch do a double take.

We make our own lists every day anyway, stripped around society's damage, and when we come back home now and again, the bois will be girls will be femmes will be right

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Friday, August 7, 2009

What would I tell them?

(This was the prompt...)

“What would you tell young friends who are afraid?” what I want to say is that the night sweats happen and then they are gone, the same nightmare appears for years and then its terrifying physics and grammar begin to transform around the dreaming you: suddenly you can pseak, you can move, you can run, you can say, now, No when before the word could only push from your lips into a screaming wait that woke you and your lover at midnight.

You see from those dreamtime changes that you are healing, your seams are coming together and it’s a slow, it’s an interminable process it will seem like it’s never ending and it ought to. Feel every minute of it, let the loss and terror burn through and be done with you. Someday it will be done with you, because you stayed with It, because you were not thrown by the fire and rage that you yourself contain.

This is a terrible thing that I’m recommending, I know.

Write it all down, all of it, even the stuff you know can’t be testified to in a court of law but that sits still on your tongue to be spoken: better to spit out the lies they fed you onto the page rather than swallow them. Now and again you can flip back through your record, see, read, how you have changed in two weeks, two months, 10 years. Build a bridge to your whole unsullied soul, still locked safe inside you, with those words. Write out all your complications and conflicts, the ways you are always in conflict, the jealousies and inconsistencies and fears. Don’t show it to anybody. These are the places we have.

Be more afraid of finding out what loss looks like from the inside out, be more afraid of losing the ability to write before you have recorded all that you are. This is you creating your own rabbit trail. Hansel and Gretel aren’t throwing down any bread crumbs or stones for us. We write our own Wonder Woman, Batman, Savior – we write ourselves ahead when we say right now what’s true. It’s the only lily-pad-hopping way forward I know. Settle into this skin of confusion with your pen in hand. Stitch away time out of your day just for writing. Let the words be the only think you hold.

And then feed yourself well. Visit the doctor or NP now and again. Call the good friends, the ones who leave you alone when you’re writing, the ones who don’t try to fix it when you cry, and see if they want to go to the beach with you. Put down the pen and pack up a lunch, get on the 5-Fulton without a book and watch through the bus’ grimy windows as the grey concrete of the city give way to the contagious riot of green in the park . Get out at the last stop and walk yourself into a thick salty sea breeze. Feed the tides your bare feet, take your friend’s dry warm hand, hold the seagull’s cries into your newfound ears.

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sheep in the wolf

It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, memory, or maybe it’s the other way around: how the devil slinks up into the backs of my brain, flashes of what’s lost or what used to be; what could have been. This is where we are now, stuck in a new reality. I’ll start over when I turn the page. I’ll start over.

It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, memory is, or maybe it’s the other way around, a sheep in wolf’s skin, the history that pushes up my spine into awareness some nights brings bared fangs and glisten, brings those eyes with the yellowing whites, brings that battered, matted fur and the thin possibility of escape from steamy breath in chilly summer fog evenings.

But what’s on the underside of that cartilage, that exoskeleton, that drape over the shoulders is the sneaky inside shape of dingy grey curls and lambs wool, the sweet breath of how we used to wish on falling stars and clap fireflies into jelly jars and sickle the summer afternoon air with our swinging pumping legs.

I mean the good and lovely hides inside the loss, the way an angry dinnertable altercation hides within it the careful way my sister and I made the evening salad, how we tore the iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes into bright rubies, nettled the carrots into shavings with a grater. The memory of my stepfather’s rage is the overcoat

and underneath was how my sister and I could bear up under that grey weight, learned – what do I want to tell you? – about keeping a straight face while telling lies I mean, we learned ourselves the uses of wearing the wolf or the sheep as needed. The way the memory at first glance is so often a covering for the deeper, quieter memory hidden inside the first the way dreams go: you see one layer and when you’re waiting or telling that one down, another layer emerges, another part of the dream, another figuring

and I am grateful for the way my brain pulls the wool over my eyes, reveals the difficult stuff first because it knows that I am not so trusting of beauty, and it slips the pure stuff in to my consciousness sideways and beneath a red cape it shows me the strengths I carried, my sister carried, even as all I could see at first is the terror: the way we were edged to resilience, the sheep the wolf, the hidden simplicity inside the mask, the way what I think I remember is never, at first, the whole story at all

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"Now is the time..."

(My own response to a prompt I gave at the Art for Recovery writing workshop a couple of weeks ago -- read the Hafiz poem Now is the time):

Now is the time for you to step back into that voice that you thought was forgotten, the voice that was left by the bedside, the missing night table, the history book, that was tucked into the upper corners of old rooms, long since painted over, a mouth wide open and unspeaking. Now is the time for this one loss, this one untenable thing, to unthread through: What if history got named something else besides seeking for revenge or – what’s the word? repercussions, retribution, or, yes, revenge?

What if this one loss weren’t anything but a life, what if that which was stolen becomes the anxious frame I built a life upon what if all the survival is the fragmented foundation what if history meant more than terror and emptiness, I mean what if a life is made up of more than what wasn’t there once upon a time. Now is the time for pleasure to be in history’s creeks and cracks, for memory to flood into the center of loss, for the green cicada throbbing to flesh out the night, the barren mornings.

I’m trying to say that there was more to what we had then than what safety, what innocence was stripped from our palms. Hafiz wants me to come to a lasting truce with god and I am trying to understand how god could have been there in the disheveled places, the times when the body splits, under pressure, into several selves, how to come to a truce with a god that meant loneliness: except, of course, that the same god made use of the blanket of that loneliness to cause some comfort in the swollen and too crowded-places in your mind and so how to make sense of the way a life works. Maybe that’s not my job. Maybe I just keep on moving, finding forever new language and framings for the old stories, the ones about strip-mining a child’s bed, about watching mothers, grandmothers in hospitals... the retold stories that attempt to reframe silencings with color and voice

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Thursday, June 18, 2009

raw and possible

061509

Initially I see these two wiry bony consecrated hands, sharp-tipped and skinny, long fingers with severely, gorgeously articulated joints, reaching down into a throat, through mouth, beyond lips and teeth and tongue, past the epiglottis, I think, past uvula and gag reflex and there is no hope of vomiting because this is going down. I see them inside, the two hands, the fingers catching hold of a wizened greenish-greying mass, this sticky dripping lump, something squeamish, tender, almost furry or corrugated, entirely encapsulated in slime -- something like a hairball or a carcass, the body of an alien life form, but without tendrils or tentacles -- something without hope or fever or mental status.

Something incoherent. Or inchoate. Or both.

The hands pull it out of its lodging the way you yank something nearly rotted and festering out of the disposal chamber in your sink -- gingerly, quick, with steady pressure, hoping your fist will fit on the way back out with you holding to the pile of not yet decomposed foodstuffs mixed with peach bits or bones or a spoon, all of which is tangling up the blades of your disposal -- I mean your throat.

It's become its own colony, this amalgamation: collecting every loop that got slipped around your neck, every swallowed I said no thank you, every murmured Please stop , every unspoken I wish you would, every clenched teeth mumbled Jesus Christ will you just get the fuck away from me, every Gosh I don't know that issued from between your lips instead of the facts that gathered boom like metal to magnet         on the other side of the gathering storm in your throat. Numbers, equations, dates, names, places, hopes, longings, dreams: all tangled together, knotted and nearly putrid         but not quite         just like the compost can be. You know it's all good stuff in there, even if it has been left all on its own to fester and decompose

The fingers begin to pick and pull at the mass, brushing away green slime         saliva and more caught for so many years, what got washed down your gullet -- and your throat is bone sore, stretched and aching, wheezing empty with sound         cavernous, open, raw and possible

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wearing nothing but my words

061609

I met her at the door wearing nothing: wearing, I guess I should say, nothing but my words.

The night before I had taken myself out again, finally, to the fancy art supply store in mid-town, the one covered in wacky paint smatterings, asymmetrical sculpture spelling out its name, a forefront of allegiance to the madcap struggling artist but that solidarity ended once the starving reached the store's front doors -- the prices were so high that it was difficult to imagine anyone I knew (all folks trying to stretch ends to meeting) actually being able to afford anything in there.

It was my favorite porn shop.

I'd visit with some guilty regularity, smoothing my hand across the ragged faces of hand-made papers hanging from the rafters and the silk onionskins, pale and aching for a pen's wet tip to stroke its surface. Then I'd linger, loiter really, in front of all the pens: the multihued variety, the different tips, the fat permanents, the sharp faint fade-able colored pencils, and more and more.

The cute butch thing who worked behind the counter tried to make eyes at me when I came embarassedly sidling in (cuz what if one of my friends saw me in the bougie joint? they'd think I was hiding a trust fund for sure), but I walked fast past her every time, cheeks flushed, hands clasped together at my front on the days I was in poka-dotted tulle skirts, or shoved deep in my pockets when I'd donned the tweed trousers.

She finally figured out the best way (the only way) to get my attention, and started holding back recently-arrived writing merchandise behind her cashier station. She had a vibrating Hello Kitty pen the first day (ballpoint, though, hardly wrote at all, and she shot the half-grin from her face when I handed it back without a single salacious innuendo) and, the next time it was a real Javanese green peacock quill that got dipped into fine ink -- but the third, the final, was when she set some of that onionskin out for me, and handed me a just-filled fine-bone fountain pen, and I set it to the page and began to write. The ink flowed like my own thoughts were being exactly gentled directly from brain through blood to words.

My cunt ached a little then, the snap of a throb, and I had to set the pen down and ask her where the bathroom was. She pointed, one eyebrow raised, didn't follow me. After a few minutes of ministration, I let myself out the shop's back door, to avoid any inquiries about my flushed face.

So the day I finally got a check from the freelance gig I'd finished several months prior, complete with a bonus for the work finished early (go figure), I knew just what I had to go back for -- and what I was going to do with it upon acquisition.

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the physicality of it

060209

This is what I love about writing: the physicality of it and the mess, the rush of words and the trying to keep up with the flood         how I got a new pen with fresh ink and so I'm trying to reclaim my wrist         this fat fast smooth ache --

what I love about writing is harnessing what's intangible, impenetrible, the desperation to get inside         fully         the thing that has no words, not really, the truth is writing is a chase, trying to catch the breath of the words, the thought, the fist thing that flashed across behind the tongue of my imaginings before it's snipped away by loss or ego or don't say that or reconstructive tendencies.

What I love is this reaching, teaching myself to breathe, to drink, to eat while I write         keep the wrist aching, move through that burn into the true good stuff, how the words aren't more important than the race, and they are.

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Tuesday, June 9, 2009

This is what my story contains

(A write from last night's workshop -- it's not edited, it's still raw and heart-beaty. And, too, here's a general warning that this piece contains some difficult and graphic material. Be easy with yourselves if you read on.)

This is what my story contains: this wreckage that is all of our wreckage, the fragmentary remembering that is never more than anyone else's remembering but feels like less, necessarily, because of the shroud trauma and loss cast over every indecent obelisk of that reckoning: an ornate crimson tinting, veiling the sharp delineated carve and curvature of breath

the way trauma is constantly whispering in my inside ear, asking Really? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? like static, that haze freezing the smooth flow of my pen as soon as I drop my hand to the page and begin to write -- static, the way a radio tuning goes cloudy sometimes once you remove the antenna your body provides when you pull your hand away and expect the music to keep on flowing smoothly on its own

this metaphor could extend indefinitely, remix with others, entwine, commingle, shadow, stave off -- but what's there is this girl holding a stepfather's balls in her one hand while his tiny, ostensibly purposefully foreshortened cock (he told her and the rest of them that he had learned an ancient Taoist technique of pulling the base of one's penis into the body so as to -- what? -- keep it warm? avoid hurting someone?) shoves rocks pushes in and out of her mouth. The clouds shroud my shoulders as I write the way her mouth clouded, too, eventually, filmy and white, and this was the livingroom couch and she was as worried as he was of getting caught -- getting caught -- by their (did I say their?) -- her mother, his wife, the innkeeper, who was in the kitchen in the bathroom in the office who was keeping to herself after a day of his constant monitoring at the private practice office they shared

the one with the Him on the couch, she's 16 or 17 or 18 or 19 or 20, this could have been any of those ages, I won't risk the static return by venturing to guess which one it was exactly. her limbs might have looked long and coltish and adult and her mouth would taste clotted and congealed and congenitaled and corpulent and contained and this moment lives in nobody's memory of her except his and her own because who can contain this kind of history? The parents and lovers who have heard the stories are longing to be rid of them, to shed their ears of the words as soon as they're spoken, as soon as the breath around each component syllable has cooled and I write because I don't want him to be the one still who knows me best in the world, most intimately, who knows all of my most fragmentary and unspeakable secrets.

Vomit up what I've told you, if you like. I'd like to. I think it's the only reason I used to drink to such excess -- heaving isn't something my body does on command. If you can do it, then we can all bear witness to the marshalled splatters, the detailed reserves, our history finally visible for all to see.

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