Beyond Our March

To Sex.

Exposed frantic sexuality, one hand swinging off the wardrobe door, tearing clothes in both directions, I recapture capturing youth from behind porcelain & wild gaze,

Refracting back through myself, naive little idiot, and glorious

The earthy guttural mixing of masculinised senses, bound by shared secrets, scratching at our backs, we grip a little tighter and see through the cracks, the burning embers of solidarity.

Hope glimmers, the cavernous papier mache is dew-kissed with tears. So often tears.

I save the most difficult questions for myself.

From Life.

I remember Oscar Wilde, one book gathering dust between Waugh & Wodehouse, they all watch us stoop to pick up remnants of our shared past from upon the floor, a knowing glare burning the horns from the rim as judgement falls

“Oscar Wilde, eh?”

My heart is racing. I haven’t the words yet. They’re still kissing with vanilla between my fingers.

Shamed, humiliated, ostracised, demonised, imprisoned. I identify, I identify hard.

This shame is not mine, I’m just carrying it until the years wear off.

The fear sets in as I turn the final pages, the picture of my innocence is destroyed, as I fall from the grace & safety of his gothic poetry.

Must be brilliant, must be witty, must be clever, must be, must, must.

Maybe they’ll forgive me too in time.

In Healing.

The road has been long, and still stretches off to the crimson end, all geometric pink torn up by red ribbons, and with a final flourish, a restoration on all our ancient houses,

A generation lost in crisis, as a world scorned on, that wilful old ignorance leaving us at last alone to die, and silence. Silence is killing us. Yours.

Where are the artists & poets, the makers & thinkers, the keepers & queeerers, the wit & the whimsy, all left unmarked & unnamed, in humane deprivation, we were starved of life & lost

We carry all this lost potential. We drink to you. We are standing on your tired shoulders.

And yet we still can barely reach our selves beyond this darkened path,

And try, try, we must remember.

By Sunlight.

I was born out of a water closet & crowned five times, twice for flow, onward & inward, once for show, once for calling, once for pride, and all for battles yet won.

I speculate distantly, and raise ethereal questions of sanity & similarity,

And left wanting, when an eye brow is raised, the eyes are pulled thin, & the smile falls away, silence prevails, and the question remains.

I arrived screaming with questions. Sometimes I found answers in some dark recess of the internet, and couldn't always cover my tracks either. I wanted to know that someone else shared those same answers. Or that I could freely ask those questions.

I found & lost myself, repeatedly, in Section 28.

We may have to work another generation through to see its effects not pull through.

Out of Nature.

Am I natural? Am i earthly? Do I not bleed & weep with equal measure, just as did my chosen ancestors?

I seek forgiveness from myself for all the hiding, I ask the universe for more time to enjoy the self I finally found, that may have been there from the beginning deep within me, or may be the product of the challenges I have faced, some won, many lost, all crucial to my spark.

My mind is lucid with history, casting my new words back through history, recklessly, looking for a friend, and I find you all, peering from behind doors, over fences, between bars, and tucked away in plain sight.

With Magic.

Now I wear the armour of my people, draped over a sea of burdened shoulders, we cry out with an all-encompassing love so that we might hear each other, and some lost child may suckle at the shared joy that marches freely through our towns and cities, cut with colour, & loud with it.

We speak with borrowed tongue, forgotten words, & we make space for the ghosts that walked us here arm-in-arm, and now, smile.

On Serenity.

The world has changed, again, for us. Some of us, forgotten twice in a lifetime, by corporate greed & sullied by ignorance shouted that bit louder from the back.

Legislative curses snake their way through between our feet, threatening to pull us back down to the ground, they’ve taken our friends already, our allies are being diminished,

And we are at risk of losing ourselves. History repeats. Repeats. We only need to listen.

If not the first time, the second, if not the second, the third, if not, if not, if not.

Now, then when.

Our Spirit.

I bundled my inner child back into the portable closet, for one last trip,

Release myself back into the wilde, a fitting scene for such a tumultuous glissade,

Rows of silent voices, echoing back through the streets, searching for new & forgotten homes,

I catch an angel searing through a gap between throbbing stonework,

And your perspex box shines back at me through grease & electric colour

A thousand stranger lips have honoured you before mine, I join that number, and march,

All but bones revived with my words, as I free my oldest demon.

I have the words now, at last, and with thanks,

O, I’m queer.