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That means that if the village says you shouldn't get pregnant when you don't have a man to provide for you and you get pregnant regardless, they can refuse to support you. They can reject and stigmatize your child.

When you make a decision—any decision—from what you wear and who you associate with to who you will be romantically involved with and what that will look like, to your education and career, family planning and whether you will leave your partner if they abuse you—the village has a say in all of it.

A proper social state, however, decides which services to provide, how much to fund them etc, there are still cultural biases there, but it won't tell you how to live your life. If all university programs are free, you can go study liberal arts instead of law, your parents can't stop you, and if the state provides a stipend, free housing and free meals while you study and also takes care of your basic needs afterwards, you have the ultimate freedom to do whatever the fuck you want to do with your life.

Want to have 8 children and a trad lifestyle in the countryside? Cool, they'll have healthcare, schooling, meals, competent teachers, after-school activities, public transit, public parks and activities—all for free. And none of that will be dependent on how many people around you like you and your kids personally and what they think of your lifestyle.

You want to be aggressively transgender and live in the city with your 8 person polycule and spend your days doing art and running a café that only does matcha? You can do that too. You'll get free housing for all of you and the business space provided for you, even if everyone in your neighborhood thinks you're weird.

The bureaucrats handing out the collective resources ideally shouldn't give a shit what you do with them.

When I applied for uni and chose a liberal arts degree instead of STEM, nobody told me "yeah no sorry we don't approve of that, you'll have to do something we think is useful or pay for it yourself". I got a free education plus a stipend, subsidized housing and food and everything else.

The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.

This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.

The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.

There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.

Noting that "to keep it real" is AAVE, we can also introduce race as a potential lens; is the narrator, despite their dominant language, subordinated based on race in this dynamic? Is the narrator not just claiming a dominant role, but perhaps also stereotyped and limited into it as a Black person? Is the disdain of the chintz also an expression of class difference, of a rejection of the display of white wealth on the part of the wife? This is pretty speculative, of course: the use of AAVE could also be appropriative, which would suggest another tactic by the narrator to lay claim to masculinity and toughness, since non-Black people often use AAVE to try to invoke racist stereotypes of strength, violence and resilience.

I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

1a. It is a WC, a half-bath, a lavatory, or a powder room for those of us who can't bring ourselves to call it the toilet (because that specifically means the fixture, not the room with the fixture in it).

זאָל דזשיי די ווענס שטיצן דײַן צוועק.

zol dzhey di vens shtitsn dayn tsvek.

I dont care if 9/10 of the people who use the wheelchair ramp arent actually in wheelchairs. As long as the 1 person who needs it has access to it.

I dont care if 9/10 people who use the automatic push button on the library door can actually push the door open themselves. As long as the 1 person who the door is too heavy for gets to use it.

I dont care if 9/10 people who buy the can tab opener, or the little guitar clamp that holds the chords for you, or the hand grip that helps you hold chop sticks, don't need any of it and just get it to "be lazy". As long as the one disabled person who needs it gets access to it.

I do not care. Oh my GOD I do not care. As long as there's a disabled person on this planet who the accessibility device will benefit, the accessibility device is necessary.

and winds that blo

and ripend grain

and glints on sno

do not stand at

my grayv and weep

i am not ther

i do not sleep

my name is birb

in sircled flite

and the soft stars

that shiyn at nite

do not stand at

my grayv and cry

i am not ther