Soho Read online

  there in the wet room tiled like an abattoir

  these boys opened their towels like the velvet curtains at an opera house

  and I opened my mouth to sing

  III SHAME

  Shame, too, makes identity.

  EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

  [have rubbed myself against bark]

  have rubbed myself against bark

  to feel a touch different from my mother’s

  filled my mouth with soil for a kiss

  pulled the buds from an upright shoot

  shoved my shorts down and sitting

  pierced by the wilderness

  face wet with want

  felt loved

  which is another boy’s

  torture and

  the sky was pixelated tv

  and shame

  scabbed my lips

  shut

  [mostly because I had been re-reading freud]

  mostly because I had been re-reading freud

  paraphrased by bersani the finding of an

  object is in fact a re-finding of it when you

  Freud/Bersani

  spanked me six seven times before penetration I

  thought about dad whacking my thighs for drinking

  bleach that one hot summer in new malden

  nestled towards the back of the shed beside a

  mallet cloudy like lemonade it didn’t burn

  exactly but felt wrong in my mouth like

  bone so I yelled for help which was two dad

  fingers rammed down my throat chunder

  then the open fist the one who protects the

  one who tends who was gentler I wonder both

  Freud/Bersani

  bearded chests lightly furred like weasels

  [even if you fuck me all vanilla in]

  even if you fuck me all vanilla in

  out slow responsible vaguely tender

  it’s still not regular intercourse

  even if we’re missionary the hairless

  backs of my knees against your shoulders

  it’s still an act of protest even if I’m

  moaning at a respectful volume

  even if you’re wearing an extra-strong

  condom even if I make you cum

  on my thigh not inside even if I

  fall in love as you pull out flop over

  it’s all still a middle finger up flaming

  rag stuffed into napalm revolution fuck-

  ing anarchy we are still dangerous faggots

  [you slug me and]

  you slug me and

  just for a second I forget how pathetic I am

  lips all prickle fizz of blood

  those middle-range pleasures that make up everyday life

  are nothing for me

  Foucault

  find me in solitary a rose

  garden of bruises

  fist flat of the palm back of the hand hollow hand

  Vatsyāyāna

  these are your tools my

  limit-experiences

  I need you to be my black-site interrogator

  ask the terrible questions of my flesh

  unearth the nail-bomb of my heart

  beat the queer into me into me

  [no muscular fields just scrub and]

  no muscular fields just scrub and

  butcher-boy works a zero-hours contract

  at romford meats ltd

  glittering knife ebayed he

  wields a chainsaw to halve

  the ruddy carcases the

  very air is close with proteins and

  on his lips offal-

  flecks bone-shards

  there is that in me

  I do not know what it is

  but I know it is in me

  Whitman

  and he cannot cut it out

  it needs to be fed

  [under neon lights my arms glow scar-]

  under neon lights my arms glow scar-

  tissue crescent-moon weals these

  healed but not forgotten medals of a

  childhood trend to grab wrists forearms

  on the playground and clasp down

  dig nails in for the squeal and blood I

  can’t say I didn’t like it though this

  touching this sticky wince the twist of

  flesh the fresh wounds smiling up at

  me these days I wear my scars like a

  bandana to mark my preference my

  fetish they read take me home rake

  your nails across my body make me

  feel like a kid again make me bleed

  [but our crab shells are orange]

  but our crab shells are orange

  barnacled strung with sea grass

  in them I cannot see heaven just

  the tanned forearms creamy skin of

  every boy whose thigh I licked before throat-

  ing their cock men change when you do this

  reek of power want to jam your head down

  gag you not so bad to die like this maybe

  Doty

  maybe and the grey sand rimed with oil

  diesel rainbows is littered with death

  so many exoskeletons glinting at dusk like

  sweat beads on a man’s body as he bucks and

  cums and mark says we cannot know

  Doty

  but I know that sex will kill us all

  [5am cadaver-slack in my arms]

  5am cadaver-slack in my arms

  I’ve no clue what

  you’re thinking

  there are limits to me limits

  to my understanding terms like

  spiritually liquefying speech

  love

  Bersani

  slip by me

  still this one reverberates like

  a wasp in a paper cup

  the boy is in love but he has no idea of what he loves

  Socrates

  none of us have ever known what we’re doing

  homos each one of us opaque as rose

  quartz I am so lost

  [legs straight as you go forward knees]

  legs straight as you go forward knees

  bent to pick up speed all those times you

  swung so high and thought the taut chain

  might buckle and the green park was a paint

  smear and each lungful of blue air ozone oh

  you didn’t need a push could do this all on your

  own the backs of your knees bruised scabby

  and still this feeling uncanny weightlessness

  upon walking into the bathhouse each half-

  smile nod sneer pushing you further into the

  steam maze until you come to a man prostrate

  waiting for you and something like vertigo

  pushes you onto him inside him and you

  move fast and rough like a kid on a swing

  [are you looking for me in these lines]

  are you looking for me in these lines

  like a urologist examines piss for blood

  come sit with me

  and I will tell you all the truth I have left

  how touch is everything and

  underneath sex is your beginning

  pick up the glass shard the bent paper clip the razor and

  dig with me for more answers

  I too am not a bit tamed

  I too am untranslatable

  Whitman

  by now you should know that

  shame is cellular real

  as the shiny blood drop rising ripe

  calamus root sweet flag on your inner thigh

  [how could I forget the hot-faced]

  how could I forget the hot-faced

  trauma the instant rash-jam that spread a

  sunburn across my face neck ears

  ages nine to twenty-two when a boy

  looked at me or looked away my blush

  we called it except for dad w
ho said

  what family are you a member of

  but shame is my birthmark semaphore

  of blood vessels skin-stain a shame-

  prone person is a person who has been

  shamed says eve still I don’t remember

  Sedgwick

  the stone just the ripple-flash of heat-

  pricks moving from shame to shyness

  to shining I hated still hate this body

  Sedgwick

  [people say shit like it gets better]

  people say shit like it gets better

  but what they mean is there’ll always be haters

  only you’ll be older

  you are twenty-seven when your father says

  gay people die of terrible diseases

  you are twenty-eight when a poet says

  makes for uncomfortable reading

  you are thirty-one when your father says

  don’t tell anyone you’re my son

  you are thirty-five when a poet you love writes

  that’s so gay

  the world has given you a silk rose

  dyed all the colours of sunset a polystyrene

  peach love I mean shame

  [you spit in my mouth and I]

  you spit in my mouth and I

  taste petals was always a

  sensitive boy and really what’s

  changed the rose garden at

  two am here I shade and

  hide my thoughts flowers

  Whitman

  close in on themselves like

  fists and men are walking

  beneath the vines tell me how to

  celebrate myself twenty years of

  Whitman

  feeling for body parts in the soil-

  scented dark and all I have learned

  the opposite of shame is not pride

  [shame on you faggot for bending whitman to your will co-]

  shame on you faggot for bending whitman to your will co-

  opting him into your self-help circle-

  jerk willing him to yawp across the tattered ages just for you

  when you aren’t even his type he liked them younger

  hopeful and all those other theorists what did you think

  leo

  paul

  mark

  jean

  eve

  michel would be your fore-

  faggots signpost your backdoor out of shame shame

  on you faggot and shame on me an italicised quote is no talisman

  all this must be lived through a second puberty this burning

  (… and if I can just push through this decades-long blush this

  SHAME SHAME SHAMEFULNESS

  will there be something waiting for me

  a distillation of self a

  queer beauty

  purer than memory certain un-

  flinching wide-eyed

  a fabulous transcendence …

  and in the deepest offal-shadowed parts of myself I feel the

  thought of myself

  free from shame but made from shame

  … is shame to be valued only at the moment one no longer

  feels its inflammation

  Hanson

  no shame is your gift from the world to the

  world that fucked still fucks you)

  [I am the homosexual you]

  I am the homosexual you

  cannot be proud of

  turbulent fleshy sensual breeding

  Whitman

  I am the boy your

  father would beat

  or fuck

  I spent my formative years

  at urinals

  defacing the grout

  W I L L I N G M O U T H

  my scraping like a boar’s tusk on bark

  piercing through the world’s contempt

  Genet

  I am not toxic am residual

  Sedgwick

  IV SOHO

  Oh My Soho!

  for Daljit Nagra

  All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine …

  WALT WHITMAN

  I

  Urine-lashed maze of cobble and hay-brick! Oh

  chunder-fugged, rosy-lit, cliché-worthy quadrant. I

  could not call you beauteous but nightly I’ve strolled your

  Shaftesbury slums for a bout of wink and fumble.

  Or hopped the iron-wrought gates of Soho Square, dank-

  scented potagerie, to harvest night-blooming buds under ripening

  street lamps. Or sloped to the Broadwick bog-house

  where the cisterns trickle in harmony like the three-stringed lyre,

  where the glory holes flicker pink-tongued. Or jumped the queue for

  MANBAR video bar, sweaty fluoro-phoenix risen from the

  foundations of MARGARET CLAP’S molly house. All this in lithe

  Eros’ crosshairs, queer angel atop the meat-rack of

  Cleveland Street. Eros wants me cum-crazy, boshed on lust,

  but I need a clear head for this trip. I am to be homo-historian –

  mean to turn Biogrope to biography, foreskin to forbearer.

  Oh my Soho,

  let me linger out tonight. I have rainbow warriors to exhume …

  II

  So who first kilned the homo holy grail? Was it the hunky

  Spartans, those man-on-man love missionaries who queered our

  leafy Roman-outpost? Or did changeling Jove himself, god-talons

  sharp for boy-flesh, his comely-white feathers, fashion our same-

  sex revolution? Was Soho still Fleet-pasture then? Ganymede

  dozing on his crook, horned goats swelling the coppery paths?

  And who might we salute for imported whips, banishment, sober castration,

  point-and-stare-in-the-marketplace marble-heavy shame?

  See, for a man to pierce a man with anything more than just a dick,

  e.g. AMARE,

  was patheticus. Even Hadrian’s bust-worthy boyf, Antinous,

  dredged sopping from the Nile, reborn a pink-dwarf constellation,

  suffered his queer temples to be sacked and plundered

  at the hands of Constantine’s Christian gentrification. And didn’t

  Caesar’s bullying become blueprint for our own colonisations?

  Filching glittering hoards of conflict minerals, leaving our subjects with leather-

  bound copies of Leviticus. Centuries of sodomites caged for what?

  An aqueduct, Regency marble? And didn’t we learn the consul’s trick

  of bread, circuses, the gruff gladiators’ bloodstained six-pack?

  Still, what is Rome tonight to the t-shirted ladz bumming menthols in the disco line

  other than Caecilius est in horto? Other than an HBO box set?

  III

  Silver-crowning Soho, throbbing within the white marble halls

  of our British Museum, is the Warren Cup. That

  Uranian chalice of Victorian naivety. That blueprint of queer

  hope. Smithed when Roman homos would meet in

  secret. Unearthed, buffed-up when us homos would still meet in

  secret yet worshipped by Warren’s velveted posse as a

  symbol of freedom and reimagined, fetishised as forward-thinking!

  Still there is more to queerness than just trans-historical

  bum-fun. More than the cup’s glittering nostalgia of myrtle wreath and

  leather strap, of embossed bearded boy-love, of gilded lithe limbs.

  What about the modern homosexual’s plea for lifestyle, joint-

  lodgings, legality? What about love? Oh my Soho, Warren’s

  cup is no wedding cup but a how-to-fuck cup passed around at toga’d

  orgies. A mischievous relic. Every empire, ours included,

  has done its savage best to stamp us out, redact our mission – its

  violent reception from the permanent collect
ion.

  IV

  Oh my Soho, you are my museum tonight! Show me instead our true

  lineage. Show me the off-stage trauma, the sentences for

  sterile acts, the gleaming shears, the specific dismemberments, the

  smouldering pyres. Show me the Poland Street pillory,

  where even in Warren’s faux-progressive epoch, boys would hang

  their blue-eyed heads in shame – all now just pissed-on tarmac.

  Oh my Soho, recall for me the WHITE SWAN twenty-seven. Hauled from ale-

  soaked interiors into the frowning dawn, paraded by the Peel

  Street Runners as dangerous poofs! My brothers, may I call you

  brothers? The billowing rainbows of Beak Street still mark