Femininity is what I like about typical men. It’s a disappointing fantasy, like the ones where penises float away. But anyhow, get up and ask me a question! Feel her, feel her heartache as if someone were two people who can never choose the identification as he too. Feel her but do not look. I want to. Shouldn’t this be porn?
I know it. I fucking think about how he thinks it’s only me he desires. And I am this often enough. I need his other in me, for me. So keep it. Say it too. Be strong and present. How does it feel? I have failed people I love by accepting their silence.
I am close to something that is not altogether desire. Make him my own, further make him a woman, clearly gendered butch. Butch is a desire, say it real, and it becomes your heart. What choice is this? I am observing someone with the hardest center, blaming them.
I am not out as a wife. If I was able to say, if I say, while we are away, “trans men are constantly grave.” He’s something frustrated, naming “fluid,” “women,” “queer.” I identify a similar world, so impossible that I feel as if I am an it. And making it through writings of gender and desire. Just type in an asexual gender. I am really trying, but it would be selfish.
I am attracted to others’ hugs. I even want me. Perhaps I can want desire. Perhaps I don’t have to just reject men. I play with a clouding wall, time-locked. I am your Rorschach, but I have an inability to be her, I’m not gay enough and my heart is insufficient. Yet I am deeply gay with him. Some may not like it.
Someone wrote stories in which she can only hate a poet if she isn’t a woman. Just never when she is sharing a masculine secret. I too saw the possibility, not because I was cooler, or her source. Shatter. Define your expended heart. Is it gay? So say they say, that you are a kind man but too shallow; you don’t know what you want.
I have body issues. I have no center. Touch my name. Accepting these things, I tried, I tried to face being, and I would pretend I cannot ever say “man.” Somehow I’m still proud, nonetheless. These activities are a part of wrenching gender, revolting gender, so I am going to be him for a whole lot of life. I’m a blushing queer. I can be, not the struggles that I have rationally, harmed by gender, by truths, by heartache.
He has 21 eyes of masturbation and anxiety. He and his bodies are men in a feminine embrace because love is sharing. Let’s go man! Let’s not be disconnected at contact, be in this closeness. Boys, that’s when you blend into life with flirtatious certainty, between doses of foreplay, struggling over who is real — is it you or me? Shatter all bodies that matter.
Never outside of life to me, back deep and oral.
Harness nerves, work, and houses.
Accommodate exposure and insist it’s desire.
At a moment: they. Real distance.
Secretly I knew you’d recoil when your eye was love.
My affection is cooler than sexuality, more eloquent than hormones.
Issue rationality, need a woman, a way, to be the same?
A flirtation, a cover, and not men.
Make NOT not the only exposure to women.
When you learn the object of your closeness. When you learn you are a boy and are revolted.
Masculine 10
Feminine 6
I am kind
I am obsessed
I am longing
I am identity
I shouldn’t be trying these roles.
Be a friend, focus on the world, focus on sports.
Lie, fit clearly.
Look at what is between my legs. Look at the object and you are revolted.
Masculine 6
Feminine 10
One (trans)
Two (sexual)
I am so proud
Exposure I accept as shallow, strong, physical.
Porn is expended, upset. Torn up fatherhood. Sad desires.
Monitor my sham.
I manifest. Really! A man for a mom.
(Trans) Man 8
Woman (can’t can’t am)
Shooting and being on and on
I imagined other interests.
I feel an out loud orientation.
Be (trans) to (world) myself (in particular).
Attraction 1 – 10
Not all love is erotic
But want want want
Tissues of memories and stories I like:
Notice the A-men, the AR-men, the fishers of men.
God seems to have compromised?
“Normal”
2 Femme
Just Femme
I noticed even back then: control, insecure, reject the body.
His/her rejection her/his way came.
Look at who is between you and God.
Can’t “they” love, not quite, also “they”
I was unhappy?
I was porn?
I was born!
You can have anything so long as I wouldn’t say I saw.
I cannot. I can’t identify as harmed desire.
Blame your fluids, go to a woman, come at me with your ideas.
Femasculine 6
Auto-eroticism (look)
Validity 10
For someone, somehow, I am all orientations: a gender god
Has men. This other could other that (or jealous I cannot have my own penises
I feel a hard part of other queers
I tried to accept my ability as a woman Particularly politicized, seeking femme rejection
My attraction shatters if I type enough Pronoun rejection\
Woman, frame, coffee, reel
Imagine a queer and out loud self, measure myself by others’ rejection
Manhood is anxiety
At present it’s messing, likely, really
Inappropriate
So far all men are homos. Some are similar such as myself. A man can be trying women’s clothes. Too. Some will say, lesbian not gay. Some will be more poetic.
Men are observing politicized desire too. I am not a sham. Muted.
A transman lesbian, my heart is on a lie. I’d rather feel them get off. It’s more than orientation, it’s fatherhood.
Rejection is shatter women-now. I focus in order to like me femme.
I wouldn’t deserve sexual pleasure. Occasionally I’m totally naked — man-boobs, tiny cock and consequence. It’s not to say that I couldn’t peer out over his face, pretending to be him. Spooking him, I make my sex through his presence.
My muscles are made out of air and silicone. I find myself always at the edge, willing myself. The closer I can see his death, the more I worry about how he goes into the moment.
I’ll write a woman. Crush himself into a thousand hearts in the form of her. My dick isn’t real anyhow, so I’m absolutely stone. He seems lost in my body. It doesn’t matter; I can’t betray myself. Breathe against him (I can’t).
I’ve encountered him before — he gets the details enough to say “my body.” He keeps going, far higher than I wanted to go. I feel nothing, just look at the shape of thin air. He wants to know: Do you understand the fiction between poetry, experience and the self? The closer I relate, the more poetry becomes a distant shadow, a deeper closet.
\\\2\\\
He’s curious about his side and how it is that it feels these feelings. He’s not touching, just looking at his insides, releasing the currents. He worries about his knee and the heat radiating from his restraints. He constructs a hard shell around himself, telling himself he is irresponsible; impossible.
My body becomes an object of his experience. His hips dive into my throat. I feel endangered by his sex on my face. I am pretending to be flat chested, wondering how it is that he intrudes, so strongly that I can remember enough to trace out my story. What I will think in order to fly!
When we sit close, I remember I’ve never felt anything contacting my body. Sometimes I am just curious about your breath, your shoulder, your height, and how you live in your own skin. But it wouldn’t be right to look at you as an object. I won’t push you. Fuck me. Try.
I’ll just snuggle up in thousands of clouds. I’ll remember the sweet smell of heat that radiates from your head when you are sleepy. When its unrequited, you don’t have to fly. Just sit close, desire coursing through your arms. I’ll become a small ball resting on your sleeve, peering out at the moment. And when I fall asleep, you can touch my throat.
\\\3\\\
Just when I was resting my arms, you ask “what happened to flying? To the sweetness of riding the warm air?” I turn my back toward you, as if you are holding me. I can feel the man in my desire and he’s beautiful.
But I have to watch my back. If anyone learned how I want, even if they haven’t, they would want to know, “what are you seeing?” and “how can you be sure? Can you even see?” And my desire would do whatever it needs to do in order to pretend. I’ll move. I’ll let go of that. Anything for you to relax into your ability to know I’m yours.
Perhaps it’s all projection and it only makes sense in the moment. If I let myself, I’ll go absolutely mute. When you ask if I’m ready, I close my chest or light it quickly into his. I told you already, that is irresponsible and impossible.
I was resting my heart on the right to be heard. I fear that sensation because a poem, for me turns feeling into numbness. I said today, on edge barely breathing…
“…”
I remind him that I was resting so he bolts awake.
///4///
The more risk the more beauty. But I want to fly. Even when we are sleepy. Still I’ve never felt something like this. Still scared, absolutely mute. Take off your face and pretend you are ready. We will talk about rising. How I feel him be. Wouldn’t it be amazing, would it? Traveling up to blend with him. What I want is beautiful.
But what my body would betray. I look over my shoulder. Our shirts over our faces covered in sweat. You will read my sex as nothing in something. What I want is possible, not straight. I fly over the canyon. You say try. I want or don’t know what I said today, “what would I do?”
Bind me into a story
I never felt anything I read, not even once
What sentence wouldn’t deserve pleasure like the fall of a glider resting against the mountainside
Awaken me at a right angle
Intimacy is not the accident you wanted, not right now
A number of swooping birds are feasting perhaps it’s ok to die to satisfy hunger
Cover me under the pain in your chest
If only he were deeply closeted, a woman on the inside
He asks me this only to look away given that it’s safer not to soar
I felt something, like a hard shell around a soft desire This sport is irresponsible, impossible, and sad And still unable to ask you close
He will circle higher than the current
Generate standing waves of love, triggers point downward
Toward a restful death without the friction of my hips
feel our pasts : look away
feel we’re pilots : doubt it
take off your subjectivity
take off your sex
I want to do, he had learned how I trace the more he wanted to This fall will give, or hit an end, like an accident, like nothing he’s willing to ask I let go, no longer numb, climbing in spite of continual descent
He will think about the instruments of height
Get within the current, ask me to try
Snuggle up into a thermal a cloud of our shirts left behind
What are common causes of shoulders?
Your hips and locks on planes?
What is just a shame? a lesbian trapped in flight
Warm air is irrational
Were it possible to find myself feeling his body
Morning Glory tells him to take me several times
Resting so amazing
Traveling inside a deeply closeted woman
I won’t push him to be the things I smell
I just watch his breath
He collapses where I begin
I chose the blog name “transpoetic,” with the intention of iteratively defining a poetics of transgender experience. I had a general idea that I would be sketching out a poetic method, structure, or way of reading that maps the emotional terrain of moving among genders, or at least my own experience of it. I wrote myself into existence.
I’ve waited this long to try to define the name of this blog because I feel too new as a writer and too unfamiliar with trans/trans* politics, and to ignorant of poetry as a genre to assert something. I still do.
There is something liberating about sidestepping intellectual and politicized approaches to knowing. I’m an academic burnout who used to study the sociology of gender and identity. I say burnout because I exhausted the limits of academic critique, empirical observation, and theories of identity politics. It wasn’t enough for me and I felt I wasn’t offering anything to anyone else either. I was hollowed out, as if my emotional life, my memories, and even my ability to feel had been cut out of my brain. So now I write differently, to grammar-fuck language, and then link it all back to the personal, political, and intellectual meanings that otherwise have structured my sense of the world.
My graduate training, and even my liberal arts college experience, didn’t expose me to poetry. In the seventh grade my English teacher, who sported a glass eye that was a different color from his fleshy eye, taught us how to interpret the meaning of poetry, of quotes, or short stories. He’d begin the class by writing a short text in colored chalk on the chalkboard, usually in orange, and then challenge us, like a drill sergeant, to push beyond its obvious meanings. He’d intersperse his challenges with sexual comments about the girls in the class and innuendo about what he wanted to do to them. Before the end of the school year he was sent to jail for statutory rape. He was the first person that inspired me to creatively think with and through language and he was one of the most (though by no means the worst) terrifying and despicable man I had encountered.
The next year I wrote poetry was for an English assignment. We were assigned to write five poems and I composed and illustrated just over twenty (proud overachiever). They were inspired by psychedelic soundscapes of Jimi Hendrix, the surreal horror of Steven King, and the probably rhymed too much.
Will I live tomorrow? Well I just can’t say.
No sun coming through my window, feel like I’m living at the bottom of a grave.
I wish someone’d hurry up and execute me, so I can be on my miserable way.
I don’t live today, maybe tomorrow I just can’t say.
– I Don’t Live Today, Jimi Hendrix Experience
My juvenile poems were the only place I could express a shitty situation: I had a crush on my teacher who also liked me very (too) much. I wrote about his car, his curly graying hair, his blue eyes, and the impossibility of our love. I wrote another one that made fun of a different teacher — an anxious football coach whose teaching strategy was to have us write answers to questions out of the back of our textbook while he ignored us. I was pissed because he was going around telling other teachers that my beloved teacher was acting inappropriately toward me:
You drink too much coffee
and your toothpick makes you drool
you keep on smoking cigarettes
because you are such an ignorant fool
Adults didn’t understand my feelings and I didn’t like being seen as naive or a victim; I felt deeply misunderstood. While writing, painting, or playing music I could leave my own body and head in a wash of color, refractions of sunlight on water, heavy behind-the-beat drums, and uncanny juxtaposition. My life was intelligible only when it was surreal.
I tossed poetry and these memories aside, forgotten, for nearly twenty five years. A friend of mine, whose mind I admire, is teaching a course involving Mayakovsky’s poetry and I overheard a conversation between him and a colleague. The colleague called Mayakovsky a “shill,” insinuating the critique that Mayakovsky lost his poetic greatness in his loyalty to the Communist Party (around the time he also started to write about love). My friend, generally cynical, countered the critique of Mayakovsky, saying simply, “I love him.”
I needed to know more about this poet and this thing about love and alienation. I started reading Mayakovsky in translation and I was struck by the ways it moved between cynicism about love and longing for love. I intuited something queer about Mayakovsky’s poetry, though I couldn’t really justify my sense of it, given how little poetry I’ve read — was it that I think there is something queer about a man writing poetry, especially poetry about love? Was it that I identified with the cynicism and longing that is so common to those of us living outside of normative genders and sexualities? So I did what any post-academic, amateur aspiring poet would do, I googled: Mayakovsky queer OR gay.
From there I found Frank O’Hara, a bunch of esoteric reviews about writers I didn’t know, written in prose I couldn’t understand, and a review of this book: Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. This was it! An anthology of trans and genderqueer poets who were self-consciously engaging in gender-language-fuckery, playing with pronouns, syntax, and imagery of crossing. I adopted its format: poems alongside poetic statements from the authors. I didn’t gain any further insight into Mayakovsky, at least not any I’ll develop in this post.
I’m most compelled by poets that express trans experience and identity through form rather than content. Poetry about identity struggle or about being trans is too literal for me; it gives me the same cringing sensation as rhyming poetry. I don’t want an explicit roadmap about where the poet is going. I want to get lost with them in their own raw confusion. I want to feel the immediacy of complex emotions that they have not yet categorized or labeled. I want to find myself amidst their deepest expressions, and be wrapped up with them in their vulnerabilities.
Given the thickness of the anthology and the number of seasoned writers within it, I don’t feel I have a right to claim that I am constructing a transpoetics. (But clearly I do, or I wouldn’t have bought the domain; I just like to perform a degree of modesty though self-depreciation, which are two of my strongest character traits.) Here’s my instructions to myself as I construct my own transpoetic voice:
Trans*Piece
confuse the subject
implode pronouns
overburden subjectivity with false idols
strip bare to the flesh
trace the evidence of gendered violence
write about sex
love and desire
disorient time
collide conflicting memories
fuse biographies
sit between everything and nothing
speak the unintelligible
confuse the subject
implode pronouns
overburden subjectivity with false idols
strip bare to the flesh
trace the evidence of gendered violence
write about sex
love and desire
disorient time
collide conflicting memories
fuse biographies
sit between everything and nothing
speak the unintelligible
The most generative theory I read in Prof. Hays Feminist Theory course in graduate school was Luce Irigaray’s essay-poem “When Our Lips Speak Together” from The Sex that Is Not One. It was the kind of text that I felt from within myself, not just one I wrangled with in the intellectual spaces of my brain. This got to me in a different way, and like poetry I could see myself reflected and refracted in it, shifting my interpretations with each read. I sensed I was a sex that was not one and found the possibility of myself in her critique of the gender binary.
If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same stories…Get out of their language. Go back through all the names they gave you. I’m waiting for you. I’m waiting for myself. Come back. It’s not so hard. Stay right here and you won’t be absorbed into the old scenarios, the redundant phrases, the familiar gestures, bodies already encoded in a system.
I know I must. Getting out is survival. Irigaray’s critique is resonant with Rich’s: men have used language and philosophy to construct the subjectivity of women in their own image, and as a repository for all of their aversions and fears. (Western) writing about women, female, and the feminine, has silenced and erased actual women’s subjectivities and experiences. Women in poetry, stories and philosophy are not women, but mirrors and projections of male subjectivities.
As a feminist queer transman how can I use language against and between the gender binary, in generative synthesis? I’m turning it over and over in my mind, how these feminist thinkers and writers, in making space for women subjectivities, both gave me a sense of empowerment and a deep sense of alienation from my masculinity and male identity. I don’t know how to talk about it.
I am a mirror of a mirror, absorbing the projections of women’s fears about men, generated by men’s fears of women, my subjectivity defined as a choice, and a dangerous one (with questionable politics) at that. I’ve been feeling very alone in this journey.
Irigaray compels me in the way she tantalizes the reader with the possibility of authentic connection, a healing from split connections and fractured subjectivity. That the “you” and “I” that have been severed by gender, by fear, by power could actually be reunited. I find myself longing for such connection with another person, never realizing that it was a disconnection in myself that required care.
When you say I love you — right here, close to me, to you — you also say I love myself…This “I love you” is neither a gift nor a debt…This currency of alternatives and oppositions, choices and negotiations, has no value for us. Unless we remain in their order and reenact their system of commerce in which “we” has no place.
When I first read Irigaray I was lesbian-identified and the possibilities for authentic connection in the taboo of women’s sexual/love relationships with women seemed like my salvation. Maybe I could connect, I could reach, you, and thereby find myself.
But it turns out that’s not how love works, at least not the kind that doesn’t flame out in disappointment. Looking at the broader context of Irigiaray’s work more recently, I understand that she was not advocating lesbian separatism and in fact trying to make sense of how women, in a full empowered subjectivity, could engage in authentic relationships with other humans (including men). She later wrote a book called I Love to You where she articulates an alternative expression of love, between equal subjects. Her discussion of love in “When Our Lips Speak Together” used to read to me as advocating a total loss of one’s subjectivity in another person, a complete union in which there is no distinction between self and other, almost as if trapped in a feedback loop of blissful co-produced fantasy fulfillment. I read it differently now:
I Love You
Subject (writer) --> Object (fantasies / desires of the subject)
Male writers have constructed women in the image of their fear-desires
vs.
I Love to You
Subject (speaker) --> Subject (another person)
Love's existence is not dependent on the response of the loved
I’ve internalized the projections of others about who I am, who I should be, and who they need me to be. Coming out as a transman has broken their mirrors and my own need to find myself in the face of another.
transpoetics 