Content Warning: this poem features mentions of suicide, and homophobic and transphobic slurs I hate bureaucracy as much as the next cracy but sometimes there’s a little pleasure in role playing wearing nothing but red tape over my nipples and leaning in to you and saying you are K and I am going to castle build out of your body with parapets made of your plastic eye covers with an oubliette in your genitalia that you forget about and then you open it up there’s a lot of skulls down there you come crying to me saying there’s a lot of skulls in there I’m like, no this is fine there’s no guilt here you are allowed to keep a lot of skulls in there it is just because you are a woman that they say you shouldn’t keep a lot of skulls in there and the skulls are all the same head shape as I have but I hate Reaganomics as much as normal economics economics that doesn’t have Reagan in the name a portmanteau created by Paul Harvey, an American radio broadcaster who appeared on ABC and died in 2009 and when he died George W. Bush issued a statement saying that millions have lost a friend I hate Reaganomics but sometimes I like to pretend to be socialised nationalised institutions and you are the free market and you fuck me hard right where it is good and hurts The first time I wanted to kill myself was when I was twelve at Scout camp these boys see me getting changed seeing that I am circumcised tell the whole camp I am circumcised I was told by the Doctor who carried out the circumcision on me that a lot of people were circumcised but it quickly becomes clear that nobody at this camp is circumcised or if they are they are hiding it a boy chews up a hunk of beef cooked on a fire the fire we built accidentally on an ant’s nest when we lit it they popped like pop corn well more like this a small high pitched whine grows in strength louder louder until pop!! imagine that but a thousand times. a boy chews up a hunk of beef and spits it onto my plate where all my hunks of beef are so I don’t eat that evening. And then I try to kill myself when they’re all asleep. With a kitchen knife we used to cut the beef he spat onto my plate. I don’t know why I thought that was a good course of action but I didn’t do it then I called myself a coward. At fourteen my brother shows me an image of a soldier being handed a flower by a boy just above in the corner next to the sun there is a helicopter what the caption doesn’t mention my brother keeps a list of every soldier killed in Iraq and another of every soldier killed in Afghanistan he does not keep a list of every civilian killed in either then at nineteen I read Judith Butler’s Frames of War which talks about how civilians are often counted as enemy combatants flesh flower like a flower made of muscle made of tissue with honey bees collecting pollen from it but the pollen is um. not pollen. the honey they make is um. not honey you can still spread it on your toast though if you like it is still sweet though if you like now I am dressing up as Great Political figures of the 20th Century for you guess who this is J Edgar Hoover who might have been a faggot might have been a tranny who hunted out the gays though who hunted out the reds though who was played by Leo Dicaprio who might have shot MLK though queer bodies as drag figures of evil politicians cottaging in no surveillance states under the cover of dark- ness sucking off a dick that crawls through this gloried hole and for the man on the other end to be Kissinger whilst you blow him he’s on the phone about Chile speaking about invading with lucious red lipstick. Time to queer the colonial. Time to queer the bodies of drones. something about this biodegradable cunt this global warming butt plug that is not biodegradable I fuck you and you scream about realpolitik about Thatcher harvesting the flowers from a pile of my bodies picking them and placing them on the grave of the first computers but not the makers of the first computers just the computers just the computers just the automated queer bodies inflexible valid now broken at the very core processing no information unlike me looking out from a terminal hub flashing lights cracking our gaycoded character limits you get it don’t you you want it don’t you Bill Clinton you will be gone before long won’t you.

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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