Fractality.

Kaleidoscope @ m2 Gallery: Writer’s Note

(From the program note for Theatre21’s production of Kaleidoscope, the first run of a show which will hopefully run many, many times more.) It was October last year when Finn Davis texted me out of the blue to ask: “who’s your favourite actor in SUDS?” Fearing a trap I asked why, to which he replied, “you’re going to write a one person show, I’m going to direct it, and we need someone to act in…

(A piece from a collection on queer transness to be released June-July this year.) it will come for you in aisles of merino wool floor-to-ceiling bleating insults “wrong shape wrong size wrong boy” it will come to you static sparks stinging touches to soft things wrong touch wrong body wrong boy wrong

it will come for you in the bark of the gallery guard even in your best boy clothes it will co…

You do not fit inside your body. It is not the wrong body, but  you have outgrown its shape.  You forget to feel beautiful.

But remember:

You use your tiny hands to write tired poems about your tiny hands 

You use your voice to explain that it is hard for you to use your voice, Judas voice, tunnel voice, that it sits in your throat like a stone

You use your chest, ugly, horror chest, to breathe in, fill the dusty cavity with future, and when you breathe out, you make things you are making

You cut shapes on walls with your  unfamiliar shadow

You use your hands, your arms, feet, legs, misshapen you, secondhand, borrowed, ill-fitting you, to dance

You take this body that chokes you and you use it to love

you were a dead boy before you were even born, too stupid brave to keep your mouth shut and now you're a murdered daughter.

they thought the woman was dead, who went through the hospital backwards. the cemetery,  the mortuary, the ER, life.

the dying comes backwards. first, you're forgotten, right names lost on lips still too sad. then you're mourned,

wrong names on sad lips repeated like rosaries until the girl  forms again, breathes again, until the girl is alive again, and you're still the dead boy.

there's not a thing in you death hasn't played with and handled back crinkled up from careless use

You taught me how to gift wrap. You told me that, now you'd decided you didn't want kids you would start travelling more. You'd already started planning your next trip. I'm sorry about the empty pages in your passport.

Honi Soit: We (can’t) exist

So this week I wrote about Arcade Fire’s new music video for Honi Soit.

It’s somewhat fitting, but mostly just ironic, that the first piece I wrote this semester was about a woman who made the world listen to her story, and how that made me feel a bit less alone–and the last piece I write is about what happens when someone doesn’t get to tell their own story, or…

“Sasquatch, Godzilla, King Kong, Lochness, Goblin, Ghoul, a zombie with no conscience Question: what do all these things have in common? Everybody knows I’m a motherfucking monster” Jay Z in “Monster”, Kanye West (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy)

I feel like if you want to be talking about Yeezus–about Kanye at all–you have to be talking about monsters.

Covert art for Yeezus, 2013.

Yeezusbegins…

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my body.

It may not mean much to say that, because in a way I am constantly thinking about my body. My body is a battleground that I don’t get to stop fighting small wars on, on a daily basis. Even when I’m not thinking about it, I’m hypervigilantly aware of its every detail. What I should probably say is I’ve been thinking a lot about what my body means, and…

[Image: handwritten note, "They called me Pinocchio / Because I wanted to be a "real boy"]

As another long (yet frightfully quick) year concludes, I am once again faced with the inescapable thought of "holy shit, you said you were going to do so much writing this year and you didn't you piece of shit".

Hence I have invented a thing--it's called "WEDID(IT)!", or "Write Every Day In December (It's Terrific)!"

Of course, I could just write every day this month without needing to announce it--but then I wouldn't get to use a fun and apt acronym, plus I think giving something a name makes it more official and thus increases the guilt when you inevitably fail (as I did when I tried to do this last year).

Now, given that it's the 2nd today because I forgot about it yesterday, I've already failed! I will not let that stop me, however, from writing on all the rest of the days of this December. I'm planning on keeping a tally of the number of pieces/word count I write, probably on this blog. Some of the stuff I write may also end up on this blog--other stuff will be on my personal blog, or I'll put it away to try and get published.