I shared some poems on Vancouver Co-op Radio’s Wax Poetic with musical accompaniment by Glenna Garramone, you can listen to the radio show by clicking here.

Cafe Deux Soleils
December 4th, 2010
8pm
$5-$10

Sick of explaining to unbelieving straights as well as gays in conversation and from the stage
that “The binary system falls short of many people’s realities,”
sick of remembering and respecting pronoun changes,
sick of trying to do my little bit to bend the edges of this repressive two-box system
to get more breathing room for you, and for me too
when so often, it seems, you choose to celebrate your hard-won second adolescence at a woman’s expense.

I don’t need you to hold the door for me, although I’ll thank you kindly when you do.
What I need is understanding that my gender is chosen
and every bit as complex
and deserving of respect, as your own.

And I know, it’s not as if there’s an abundance of positive male role models out there
from which to pick and choose.
But damn, don’t I wish that that could be a gift
my queer peers give to the dominant culture
along with turning assumptions about gender upside down, sideways and around,
the courage necessary to face down sexual shame and actually talk honestly about desire,
and a hundred and one fun safe and sexy uses for latex!


I don’t propose to try to deny anyone access to community.
I’m not about to present Lisa’s List of who’s worked on gender and sexuality
enough to join us here as thinking queers, but I would like to know:

What kind of responsibility rides with your expanded set of masculine privileges?
Who do you confine while you find new ground?
Has your girlfriend become a foil for your gender? (If so, bro, did she agree to that?)
…And do I hear you interrupting more often when wearing a binder? 


I’ve been talking about this for a long, long time. Someone less stubborn might be discouraged by now.

So, whether you’re masculine-identified for a night, or embarking on a new life with or without hormones and surgery,
please believe me –
genderfuck is so much more hot
when you pack some analysis along with that cock.

having hidden her insecurity
by extending generous forgiveness
to anyone who ever hurt her,
in the hopes that if she eased their guilt
they’d like her enough to be kind to her,

having repeatedly strained
at unsustainable rates
in one hundred ways
until careening into an internal limit,
surprising herself
almost as much as everyone else
by how abruptly she

…stopped…

super goat decided to try for a little humility;
finally unflinchingly faced her overwhelming fear
of being unloved,
made the choice to grow up,
and declared herself to no longer be a super hero.

she cheerfully recommended to those who reacted
with dismay that they go fuck themselves,
and then

she tied up her cape between two trees
and stretched out happily in her new hammock

to sleep for a week.

creative autonomy

there’s no pressure to compromise, downsize or otherwise bend your words to fit someone elses’s idea of suitability i.e. marketability. you’ve only gotta please that toughest of editors – yourself.
self publishing waits for no one’s permission. it does not sit meekly at the back of the room/end of the line/ bottom of the pile, hopinghopinghoping for approval from those on high.

community

friends get a chance to demonstrate their support for you and your art by coming over for folding and stapling parties in your living room.
(…and that chapbook you left in a little bookshop on a little island a little while ago gets picked up by a girl on an adventure – she takes it home, halfway round the world, and reads your words and thoughts and incitement and excitement to a whole roomful of open eared people. years later, you get to meet that girl and those open eared people while on an adventure of your own, and the conversations continue…)

exploding the artificial constructs of time

self-publishing happens now. not penciled in to the 5 year plan of a risk-averse publisher that moves at the speed of schedules – other people’s schedules, that is.
you write to a pace that skips or slides to a scale of time that doesn’t divide evenly by 12, april to april? self-publishing, please step forward.

sex appeal

homegrown, handsewn individual touches on copies of limited edition runs of 200 or less are hot.

accessibility

it’s diy. that means do it yourself – not waiting around for prince(ss) charming to arrive on white steed with publishing contract tucked safely in saddlebag. no.
there is no recommended retail price, no barcode, no middle man. you decide how you want to value your work – whether it’s a gift, 2 for a tenner, or something you barter for someone else’s handmade creation.
self-publishing does not require that you force your creative impulses into one single direction. self-publishing is a format for painters who take photographs, singers who sew, graphic designers who write.
self-publishing raises a middle finger to dominant notions of what art is, what art is for, what art is worth, and who makes art.

intuition can smell a lie
and will shout with incoherent fury at me
for 3 years until i finally grasp what it points at.

intuition’s brave, blunt, unapologetic
accepts reality as it is
then enters a quiet room to meet imagination
expands to fill the stillness
picks up my pen
and writes a poem on its own.

* originally published online on december 25th, 2008

I also dislike breathing clouds of marijuana or tobacco smoke; I get headaches and nausea. But. Being comfortable is not the point of a demonstration, and I do attend on occasion, willingly if not enthusiastically, and especially when they tell us we can’t. Can’t protest outside of the designated zone, can’t carry an anti-Olympic sign – at these times, it becomes necessary.

I wanted to feel good about disrupting the route of the torch, and that we accomplished that without any violence. But I had a distinctly creepy experience walking towards the VAG last Friday. You know when you cross the border into the States and not much has visibly changed except from kilometers to miles, but then you realize that there are flags everywhere, and even though you know to expect it, it still evokes this kinda amused/incredulous/weird creeped-out feeling?

I had that exact feeling, in canada, last Friday. Walking past hundreds and hundreds of Olympic fans with Olympic scarves pins hats & backpacks, carrying and wearing canadian flags, with the maple leaf temporarily tattooed on cheeks and forehead – this in particular gets to me, by the way, because I can remember when maple was the trees I climbed whenever I had the chance, and an annual autumn display of a hundred glorious shades of red, yellow, orange and deep deep purple-maroon in southern Ontario, not this particular branding of what is somehow passing as patriotism. I almost expected one of them to accuse me of not supporting the troops. I’d thought my cynicism was thick enough to protect me, I thought I was past the point of disappointment. I thought I had accepted the fact that, to a lot ordinary canadians, the Olympics are a fun party to attend or just watch on TV, and they are pointedly disinterested in the compellingly obvious connections between things like Olympic corporate funders and environmental destruction, the tar sands and genocide, growing poverty and the social control industry, a crushing public debt and the cost of fake snow…but apparently there’s still room for shock in me.

In fact, if I were inclined to speak of a country as a person, instead of a collectively agreed upon narrative created by arbitrary lines on a map, I might say that canada hurt my feelings last Friday, and it made me so, so angry. Before I knew it, I had just about become one of those inarticulate assholes, staring back at red-leaf-decorated zombies attending the games…all I could think to say was Grow A Brain. Grow A Fucken Brain.