Anti-Boy-George Psychomechanics (ROUND 2)
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: Pardon, by Nasomatto. A chocolate-oud preamble to (and second-rate version of) Bortnikoff’s Oud Monarch, Pardon—hard, like many of Gaultierie’s heavy-synthetic screamers, for me to get deep and reliable whiffs of)—combines the machismo of leather-woods Duro with the sensuality of scotch-amber Baraonda in what amounts to a sexual fragrance of petrichor patchouli and lemony florals enveloped in a moldy dust of cola cocao and almondy sandalwood—likeable even in spite of the nose-blind issues, although as of now I am unsure if it bests its more gourmand brother Boccanera.
Anti-Boy-George Psychomechanics That boxcutter-to-wrist discomfort in his skin seeing (or even just imagining) his peers seeing how grotesque, unconvincing (unfuckable, except in violence) he appeared as a girl—how could that not fuel his rage against whiteness and its rapey fister of an arm (the anti-trans arm), the nightmarish supremacy of which he read his discomfort as cogito proof (“my truth” QED)? And with such rage, rage knowingly impotent (a knowing common to apex victims), he leaned harder into that disguise he knew to be disguise (a knowing, of diazepam-ICU caliber, he read as proof of whiteness’s to-the-elbow carnage). He bought new wigs (two with prefab ponytails), a Braun wet-dry epilator (Black Friday discount), and a glut of other transformer goodies—all on Amazon (somehow in spite of white reign): Transformations Labs’s breast-plump serum; some how-to manuals on MTF voice training (From Baritone to Barbie: A Vocal Transgression and Femme-Phonics: Hacking Inner Authenticity with its promise to help transitioners “feel at least some semblance of safety in the era of Trump”); Unclockable’s “beach tight” tuck kit, which came with a sterling silver estrogen molecule neckless (“our gift to you, because being trans is a gift”). He scrubbed online profiles so that none linked to birth-family boyhood, every pixel calibrated to feminine hobbies (like makeup) performed with smaller strides and more delicate gestures as if to resurrect the oven-apron fifties of Sears— as if his real affliction was more like depression (depression, he would agree, from growing up with transphobic 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 and deadnamers. And yet all this correction only carved it deeper: that boxcutter-to-wrist discomfort in his skin.
