Anti-Boy-George Psychomechanics (ROUND 3)
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 VIII, by Amouage. A gingery feast of bananas-and-cream white florals leaning in a feminine direction despite its classic aftershave components (rooty vetiver, minty bay rum) and its undertone of smoky leather (metallic saffron, campfire guaiac wood), Opus VIII reads to me like the frankincensey big sister of Nishane’s Hundred Silent Ways (which, although sharing the white florals and even the vetiver, has a feel less of bananas and cream than of peaches and cream—a creaminess boosted, beyond what we see in the more terpenic Opus VIII, by its combo of sandalwood and orris butter).
Anti-Boy-George Psychomechanics That boxcutter-to-wrist discomfort in his skin seeing (even just imagining) his peers seeing how grotesque and unconvincing (how unfuckable, except perhaps 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 cyber 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). In hallways, buses, he rifled through purse clutter: faded receipts, dead coupons, bent bobby pins— prop clutter (down to the requisite coins and crumbs, tampons) to seem like girls on TV, rifling in show (having already landed on the berry lip plumper). He practiced blushing in the bathroom mirror, cheeks that crimson after a good Sean Connery backhand. YouTube taught him to giggle with less breath, just enough to seem coy (his heart unable to deny that such frailty only amplified the football frame). His calves really betrayed him. So he skipped meals and stopped taking stairs, the fury of his discipline matched by his cursing of misgendering deadnamers. And yet all this correction only carved it deeper: that boxcutter-to-wrist discomfort in his skin seeing (even just imagining) his peers seeing how grotesque and unconvincing (how unfuckable, except perhaps in violence) he appeared as a girl.
