Fuck off with your "non-invasive procedures" - I'm a poet-warrior!

I have been reading through the Rhexis archives and it strikes me that this site has been rather loaded in the direction of Angry Young Man ranting. Clearly things need to be evened up a little. So here's a vaguely kinky feminist offering, and yes, it's slightly arsey and fluffy and poetic and I wrote it at eleven o'clock this morning after eating a packet of Pro-Plus. Commentbots, shoot me down. I am terribly unrepentant.

Poet-warriors need regular disinfecting. So here I am in the shower late at night, thinking too much again, trying to clean my mind, clear my head, hot solving water running in blessed rivulets over my shoulders.

Stepping out into an in-between-planes world of steam, scrubbing away at the other side of the mirror, is an Angry Young Woman in a dirty pink towel. Maybe a new breed. I clutch at my own flesh with writers' hands; spattered with little constellations of inky stars, scrawled with doctors' appointments. I buckle myself into a suit and tie, slick back an unruly crop of dark hair. Still-clammy skin breathing girl-perfumes into boys' clothes, stolen or borrowed. Scent of kink and confrontation. Armour and actuality.

I could pretend that this female body I inhabit is extraneous to the cause, I really could. After all, I am shocked regularly enough by the sudden strangeness of form of this irregular little frame I'm living in to know that my body is not my mind is not my heart and soul. But why the necessary discrepancy?

Poet-warrior-girls, girls who are born poets and academics and writers and truthsayers, we don't need to make the choice between sexuality and credibility, do we? No, we don't. Fuck that. And yet, in this city, that's what the frantic majority of us do; the bluestockings button up their blouses, the barbie dolls dumb down when they're out drinking with the boys. Not even the lesbians get off so easily, although apparently they do if they're at Hilda's.

It doesn't have to be so clean-cut.

Oh yes, dears, I'm a feminist. I've read my Wolf, my Woolfe, my Wollestonecraft; Daley and Offenbach, the big-gunning big sisters of the women's movement who seemed like they would tear down cities of pain and dirty power and claim the female body back for us, and who managed in the end only to set it, gemlike, in a new cast of clawlike socio-academic discourse. The fairy godmothers of feminism who, in the end, were fatally unable to take a joke. Thank you, ladies, all the same.

Younger, I burned, I raved for the revolution I was born too late to save; having already digested The Female Eunuch and taken its polemic suggestions as gospel, when my first period appeared I put a finger between my legs and tasted, a challenge to my own disgust. Wasn't bad, really. Bit salty.

I'm sorry, does that shock you?

It's funny in here, chaps. Nakedness like alcohol makes me feel horrible and sexy. I am addicted to this form. I dance in it, I fuck with it, I write out of it, I dress it up with my various confrontational makeups to assault the unenlightened with sudden savage beauty. I sit with my legs apart and laugh with my head thrown back and sometimes I dress like a girl and sometimes I sleep with girls and sometimes I sleep with boys and sometimes I dress like a boy. But I'm not a boy.

I'm an Angry Young Woman with my softskinned idiosyncracies, my poetry and my politics and my pink lipstick.

I am NOT a poet in the body of a girl.

I'm a poet warrior, so you can fuck off with your Women's Studies, your sterile intimate wipes, your waiting rooms and your non-invasive investigative procedures.
And sex is as much a part of my armour as my fineliners, my whisky, my books of Blakeian dystopia -I enjoy it far too much; it keeps me firing on all cylinders; and it gives me this vague notion to mangle people's minds. Tell me that being a poet-warrior is extraneous to my being a young lady who likes sex and sedition, you may as well tell James Dean that the leathers and the huge motorcycle had nothing to do with it.

They had EVERYTHING to do with it.

So, sometimes I'm a boy, and really I'm a girl. Gender is a fuzzy area that's slicker and sexier when it's removed from dry academia. I live in my body, but I am not my body, but I am fast and fuckable and in your face and still haven't learned to sit with my knees together.

I am what the best and most terrible of us are, a new breed of young and luscious meta-evolved bloody mental mongrel, and if it bothers you, you can be one too. Buy my drugs. Make my meals.

Suck my sticky strap-on.

I'm being straight with you.

Drop me a bitter kiss. I'm sitting still for this. We are broken and brilliant creatures and ecstasy and enlightenment are our birthright.

Echoes, Roars and Dinosaurs

I am perched in a tree in the middle of Oxford late at night, smoke curling gently from my lips before being stolen away by the same mischievous wind that is running through my hair and playing amongst the leaves. There's a thousand and one thoughts rushing through my head at a million and one miles and hour as I stare out at the City. Suddenly, they all stop at once and are replaced by a curious and rather profound feeling.

It's one I've experienced before, flying back to England under a perfect sunset of orange and blue and rolling green countryside. It's a feeling of connection. It was like I could see all of England below me, and the land was alive and breathing softly like a sleeping beast that I could easily have reached down and stroked. The feeling was so strong that I thought that British Airways had spiked my dinner with psychedelics until I remembered that their service isn't that good.

This time it's the City that I'm connected to. It's a sensation that I often get when I walk through familiar places late at night, when there's no-one else about. The City is empty, and for now, at least, it belongs to me. The spotlight from Magdalen College is screaming up into the night, slicing the sky in half. One of the labs is lit with its own eerie green light, like some sort of twentieth century Minas Morgul. In the distance, the constant sound of the cars; steel workers toiling up and down the motorways.

I'm jostled from my thoughts by a solitary cyclist as he trundles past, clearly surprised to see a dark figure looming out of the tree above him. For a moment, I am sharing the City with him, another creature of the night, but then he passes and I have it all to myself again.

"The Kooks are out in the streets, Oh we're gonna steal your skies."

I lean casually back into the tree trunk and stare out into the night at the City unfolding before me, full of memory and promise, past and future. I can't see most of it, but I can feel it there, looking back at me. During the day it's too busy, there are too many voices, but at night it's quiet and I can talk to the City, and it will listen to me. A gentle smile curls from my lips and the City smiles back.

Quietly, I slide down from the tree and wander home. After all, it's cold out tonight in my City, and I can hear my pillow calling.

Albion Morning?

Hah.

So. Here I am. It's six in the morning, and I've got the whole big, windy country to myself. All its hills and motorways, and the valleys and the high rises. All asleep, quiescent in the bird-noisy grey of predawn. Red lights on the pylons still, and the whirr of the milk-freight, and it all belongs to the few still awake. A living picture of possibility. Pastel and promise. The aerials are all pointing north atop their houses, sentinel cranes waiting for a monstrous call to migration. I'm on top of the world, Ma Earth. Colour has weird depth at this time, this nullspace of first light. Each shade hints at deeper layers of tint beneath, each patch of tone is not a shape but a well into a dimension filled with teal, with scorched orange, with deep purple-grey. The birdsong is not a delicate counterpoint. It is a cacophany of tiny winged demons, all shouting their little bastard hearts out because WINTER IS DEAD. Nor are the still cars steel beetles. My country when it sleeps is not the land of cliché. They are capsules; tiny sealed rooms of mobile and limited opulence. The wind brings the news. Blowing no good, perhaps, but it's motion and knowledge from Another Place. It's on the move. It cuts through flesh and bullshit, chilling me to the core. The first routine car engine coughs alive and the commuters begin to move. And my country is theirs again, till the end of the day.