Woah, haven't blogged here in a while...a poem for you

Been ages. Schools in session again and the world keeps on spinning...
I have missed you blogosphere
and blow kisses at my followers...

went to the gym today and again
fell in love with the woman who works the front desk.
You know ladies, the kind of woman who can make a t-shirt look glamorous. I wish I had a picture
so you could share my enthusiasm...alas, words will have to do...

to be her for an hour!


The crossdresser has a crush. For L who works at the gym.

45, 46, eyeliner crushed blue and ribbon silver
face cut by age, sharp as a A-line skirt
and as glowing as Venus' curves. She greets
and smiles
and knows not
of my trimmed legs
my lust to be in a body like hers:
tall, curvy, thick, hips that could crush mountains,
breasts to nurse the worst of us,
heart to love the best.

I work out,
and catch glances
of her, as if machines and cardio could imprint
her shape onto my lean coffin frame.

What she would think of me I dare not seek
for I know she is good and straight as she watches her desk,
manages accounts,
and would feel queer
and slighted
at my feminine wiles.

mind is restless

I'm still awakening my female voice. For what ever reason it is still repressed and I'm taking measures to break out of my shell so to speak.

In my creative life I'm writing almost exclusively about transgendered characters, although I maintain the stories are mostly about characters who happen to be transgendered, etc, et all

Currently sketching a novella/novel about a post apocalyptic world where one the survivors is post-op (perhaps I'll change it to pre-op) transsexual trying to survive in a The Road type/road warrior/zombie apocalypse etc. world.

One of the angles I'm taking is that the other survivors don't value the MTF's worth as a person because she is sterile. This makes her an outcast. Obviously she is awesome and overcomes this kind of prejudice, but I think it gets to the heart of transphobia....we are hated because we are not one but two, and if we follow the transition to its natural medical conclusion, we are sterile.

Anyhoo...what I'm up to.

I'm reading you all. even if I don't post.

A fabulous Crossdressing read

The Late Mr. Shakespeare is all about Shakespeare.

It also happens to be about crossdressing and a major theme is gender blurring.

The narrator, Pickleherring, once played all the female roles in Shakespeare's plays, and in his late years is writing a biography of his former master. In it is a lot of interesting stuff about Shakespeare, real or imagined, and a great deal about sexuality, wearing stockings, pretending to be a woman, and men and women pretending to be the opposite sex during sex, etc.

Now it isn't pornography, by the writer has a pornographer's heart. He suggests that Mr. Shakespeare's powers originated in the heart of a gender bending relationship he had with his dark mistress.

If you don't like Shakespeare, skim around. The major crossdressing chapters are easy to pick out, but there is plenty scattered throughout.

I am sick of being sick

Pneumonia is so sucky...


My feeble attempt at NPM...sorry to you bibliophiles...currently tracking down a Judith Ortiz poem about crossdressing, as well as a super trashy, drag camp epic Disneyland on Acid...yum




Untitled

Before I awoke
Work was simply work
And stress was simply
Stress, and now that I
Am awake, a bright
Penny in a chipped dish,
The work is settling into
My new skin
My mind a fresh red button.

A few lines about the mind transitioning

I hope you ladies are bored by my promotion of National Poetry Month. I do feel as a member of a marginalized community that we uphold those who advocate and express the feelings of our united experience. I've hit an energy level wall in terms of finding more TG themed poems. A break is coming up and I'll catch up...

As a semi professional writer I enjoy flexing my mental/imaginative muscles. These few lines are about my mental transitioning in a completely metaphorical/imagistic mode.

BTW Thanks for the comments and email...I appreciate it


Untitled: or a few lines about the mind's gender transition

A song drifts through a far away window.
The washline snaps in the breeze.

How dresses whip and curl like sharp Ps and Bs

and my mother is in the kitchen
and when I’m sure no one is looking
my hips and arms cock
and bend and arc
as if my body were

her hip and curve and hair

or
refracted light
a broken sunbeam shattered by a tall oak
at the edge of field
near a wood where only the birds know
the language.

I didn’t want to play house
but did anyway, and found I loved it as I loved baseball,
and playing family, too
with the dozy girl down the street.


And now I’m the dozy girl down the street
the song blaring now, as if from the next room
and I can see the ladies listening,
and smell the perfume,
the powder and cigarette smoke swirling in galaxies before me
and I swim in the them,
and the dresses
and hose
whip and curl,
whip and curl over my skin

and I am undone, and put back together
and I am both, and all, and nothing.

My body is enlarged by fresh clothes,
my mind as curvy as any soft body

as any soft touch.

National Poetry Month: The Factory

Because Sunday has forced me to be proto homme, I'm giving my head and heart a girly artsy party.

And because I'm too beat to hunt for TG themed poems...so I'm posting one of my own..written today for Nat Poet Mo...the girls mentioned, if you don't know, are TG

The Factory

How the films unspool and unspool
and fall like wet spaghetti at his feet,
his dainty feet…like they crawled off some Christmas elf
and got stranded on his stumps.

And Candy’s eats the air like a heavy hail coming ‘cross a field
and Joe and Holly and Jackie
crunch pills and silver pies
and everyone waits for a fat silence to spread,

but there is only gossip and pick-up lines
and endless soapy singing,
and thick branches of smoke,
and so many promises

and too many people loving all alone.
Soon the sun will swallow everyone up.
Where did the girls go? Where is the phone?
And who will clean all of this up?

And the parties end like they begin:
phone in the hand of a mirror man,
hot cigarettes on the lips of beautiful,
like wicks on rail yard dynamite sticks.

Poor Southern Trans Boy

In The Sweet In-Between, Oprah Book Club author, Sheri Reynolds, offers us Kenny Lugo, a person who is Kendra to her father, Ken to his schoolmates, and Kenny, at home. The tri-spirited hero is struggling to maintain identity, after many years of exploitative experiences with the whisky faced men of Lugo’s life, Kenny is trying to figure out if she is a boy or a girl.

“I hate my body, I hate.” Kenny says, taking great measure to control her water consumption so he won’t be forced to use the girl’s room at school, where Ken is a freak, a lesbian, a T-country boy who only wants to please.

Oh, and Kenny is haunted.

Not in the literal sense, but metaphorically, for Kenny’s drunken neighbor, Jarvis Stanley, shoots a college girl dead when she and her friend accidently break into the house, mistaking it for the rental across the street. The dead girl’s life haunts Kenny. She can’t help but identify with the dead girl. For her life is slowing dying, and like the dead girl, Kenny will soon belong to no one, for when she turns 18, her father’s girlfriend, Glo, won’t have to be responsible for her anymore. Kenny will be alone.

Everyday Kenny goes to school he pines for the dead girl’s car. Imagines crawling around in her blood, wonders, wonders, wonders. What if?

Kenny must survive because the dead girl didn’t, because Aunt Glo’s oldest is a drug addled walking poster for death, and because who will take care of Daphne, the half retarded sister of the aforementioned drug addled walking poster for death? Kenny exists for Daphne who gives Kenny dimension, and balance. Daphne loves Kenny for who she is, for who he is, for everyone.

Add to the fact Kenny lives in a restrictive, run down rural town in Virginia, and her chances for acceptance are slim. Everyone is trying to define Kenny for her, for him. I'm not a lesbian, I'm not, Kenny thinks as her young adopted brother points out. Others are quick to say she has a lifestyle, which befuddles Ken further.

I don’t know any fiction books about trans men, and the Sweet In-Between sidesteps the issue if Kenny is trans, or just a lesbian cross dresser, not that it matters anyway. Kenny’s self hatred is identifiable for all T-persons regardless of spectrum and depth of gender dysphoria. Ken, and Kenny may be freaks, but when Kenny is forced to play Kendra we become flies on the wall for ego crushing humiliation when Kendra must visit her father up state in prison. Just who really are the freaks? Those who have courage to be who they really are, or the ones who judge and punish anyone who steps out of the gender box?

Kenny’s just finding herself, which is part of the appeal, like a hero on a quest, he must deal with his “titties” and how to bind them, “blood” and how to conceal it in case Ken bleeds through his jeans; rituals created to save the self, to bolster the defenses against a world that isn’t very tolerant of variant behavior. Too bad, too, because Kenny has a lot to offer, as well as Reynolds’ whose luminous prose burns through the paper. A nice companion piece to Luna.

Fireflies. Moon. Darkness.

--note this book is a quick read--unfortunately it was one book I kept putting down and then getting distracted from finishing--thus the delay in the review.



Liam waxes and Luna wanes and poor old Regan must witness, like a far away star that the moon has enticed to supper

Chemistry? Why did it have to be about chemistry? Regan cries in Julie Ann Peters’ young adult drama Luna, Regan whose heart is burdened by her brother, Liam’s, secrets, as Liam transitions into Luna, which threatens to pull the entire family’s life ordinary blah blah suburbia into chaos.

Peters adopts the last tenants of macho suburbia as the blueprint for Liam’s home life: go talk to the coach, son, let’s re-build a Volkswagen, son, date pretty girl, son etc., a blueprint I recognize from the 80s and 90s, and which no doubt persists today, hopefully a little less macho than it once was, I think, for much of that macho-ness is a hand-me down from be-a-man-disease from the 1950s, which slowly erodes away as younger men become fathers. Younger men who hold on to macho-ness a little less tightly, I think. Not Liam’s Dad, though, unfortunately for Liam’s Dad, Liam has discovered the internet, and that he’s transgendered.

Oh, Liam’s known since he pined for a bra when he was twelve. During one of Regan’s slumber party Liam edged his way to the slumber party floor, where his toenails were painted by Regan’s friends and Luna slipped out, just so much. All he wanted was to just do his toes and talk, you know, be a girl. All he has ever wanted. And now older, he has vocabulary, now, he has trans friends, albeit virtual, and they, be their existence, give Luna permission to grow.

First there was Liam, then Lia Marie, the slow moth cocoon of Luna, only a silky nub. As Liam ages the truth of his nature grows, and Liam becomes only a shell as Luna struggles with going out in public, wigs, and coming out to Dad (Mom’s an after thought in this—a shadow of a pill user), and avoiding a black hole of depression.

Peters nails the issue from all sides, the pain, the burden of the secret-keeper, the parent’s self-serving fog, the consciousness enlarging experience of cross dressing—the high of stepping into a new identity. Peters even nails the revulsion stones feel when they encounter a trans person. Trans people are freaks to everyone else, the stones; the clerks quiver, jocks hate, an older man stalks them at Taco Bell. Regan is witness and protector. Secret keeper and soul guardian.

The book is really about Regan and the hazards Luna’s secret wreck upon her life. She’s a loving sister that deserves her own life, only Luna’s life is too big for one person, and Regan is almost swallowed up.

Which is why the novel is so haunting, because you want all this little family to just tune into each other and open up. Dad is too gender blind to see that his son is anything but a regular boy, Mom too career blind to notice. And Liam (and I mean Luna in boy mode) is so freaking eager to be the dutiful daughter it made my stomach ache. Of course no one allows him to partake in these roles, only Regan, who allows Luna into her bedroom at night to do her make-up and play with wigs and pose in the mirror. It’s a beautiful mess, beautiful in the way dying stars are beautiful, because Luna’s emotional scars are palpable.

For trans teens there is no easy solution to the pain. If everyone were more tolerant then Luna would have found herself earlier, perhaps, but this is not the case. The paperback version includes a discussion group for teens and adults, which was a happy find. The very fact this book was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young Adult Fiction is happy news indeed.

Currently reading....

Synopsis

Regan's brother Liam can't stand the person he is during the day. Like the moon from whom Liam has chosen his female namesake, his true self, Luna, only reveals herself at night. In the secrecy of his basement bedroom Liam transforms himself into the beautiful girl he longs to be, with help from his sister's clothes and makeup. Now, everything is about to change-Luna is preparing to emerge from her cocoon. But are Liam's family and friends ready to welcome Luna into their lives? Compelling and provocative, this is an unforgettable novel about a transgender teen's struggle for self-identity and acceptance.

Annotation
Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award for Young People's Literature


One of my many hats includes reviewing books for a variety of literary journals and magazines. One of my regular editors had some old review copies she sent me and among them was this...The cover caught my eye and to my surprise it concerned a TG teen. So far it's great. Luminous (excuse the pun. I can relate to the main character to a point, particularly when it comes to the descriptions of gender dysphoria. Though transition is not an option for me, those who have decided to transition would probably enjoy it.

Full review to come!


Note: the author writes GLBT fiction for young adults. But adults will find much to admire here.