Anti-Boy-George Psychomechanics
Let’s workshop this poem about living in a recidivist era where, in a fuck you to the work of gender-stereotype smashers like Boy George, we seem to have reverted to 1950's style male-female norms.
scent of the day: Opus IV, by Amouage. Opus IV—an aromatic spicey-green heavy-hitter (one the best in the Opus line)—opens with a citrus spice (coriander, rose, elemi) that for the first few seconds (perhaps because of the labdanum base) calls to mind the leather-saffron genre—that is until an Opus-VII-reminiscent pea-pablum galbanum rises along with a blasphemous combo of church incense (elemi, olibanum) and a Kenzo-Jungle cumin that (amplified by the bitter cardamom, anisic caraway, and musky civet) comes off more aromatic (more powdery, more ozonic, due to the violet) than in Fate Man (whose own cumin, while heavier in dose, is comparatively blunted, like saltiness in a sauce is by heavy cream, by a labdanum of Laudano-Nero proportions).
Anti-Boy-George Psychomechanics That cutter discomfort in his skin he felt seeing (even just imagining) his peers seeing how grotesque, unconvincing (unfuckable, except in violence), he appeared as a girl— that only fueled his rage against whiteness and its liveliest arm (the anti-trans arm), the nightmarish reign of which he regarded his discomfort as (my-truth-era) cogito proof. And with this rage (knowingly impotent, knowledge only the highest victims share) he leaned further into the role, the disguise (the disguise he knew to be disguise—a fact he took as further proof of the elbow reach). He bought new wigs for ponytails and bangs, a Braun wet-dry epilator (Black Friday sale), and various other transformer goodies— all on Amazon (despite white supremacy): Transformations Labs’s breast-plump serum; two how-to manuals on MTF voice training (From Baritone to Barbie: A Vocal Journey and Femme-Phonics: Hacking Validation, both promising to help transitioners “enjoy a semblance of safety in an unsafe world”); Unclockable’s pool tuck kit, which came with a silver estrogen molecule neckless “for free, because being trans is a gift”). He scrubbed his online profiles so that none linked to birth-family boyhood, every pixel calibrated to feminine hobbies performed with smaller strides and delicate gestures as if to revive the oven-apron fifties of Sears— as if his real affliction was more like depression (depression, he would agree, of growing up with anti-trans violence in every textbook). His calves betrayed him. So he skipped meals and stopped taking stairs with a fury matched by his cursing of misgenderers, deadnamers. And yet all this correction only added to it: that cutter discomfort in his skin he felt.
