For the longest time, my body and my civil state were something I had to forcefully reconcile through faded forms – I remember the thickness of some fabrics, the excuses I came up with to avoid knocking at any door.
So my self-portrait starts here, with yet another sidestep : I simply cannot collect myself.
Can’t get myself together. Won’t set myself straight.
I disintegrate,
Like the slow explosion of an idea.
Smells and names do define. I hardly own any.
I spent hours in shops, desperately breathing perfumes. I still regularly fantasize about identity theft.
My smells, my names,
Since my early childhood, I lost them constantly, in nosebleeds or in friends’ tears – I simply forgot about them. Some love to reminisce ; I already melt with the stream that runs ahead. And yes, I found some solace in lying, for there is a softness in the way stories harden ; in them lies a burning accuracy – I’ve been more sincere in my novels than in any other conversation.
I only exist ahead (desires!), which quickly made me see myself as a spear, a mist, a projectile.
It wasn’t a first, but this time,
with naming myself came some different wind.
Christine.
I kept on whispering it with awe.
In the subway, in the streets, in my small flat in Lyon : Christine.
I jubilated, I knew something they were still unaware of : I became.
All the pieces of advice thrown at me over the years tasted like iron in my mouth ; you should try to be, better not to, you could after all ; I was told to endure through it, to deal with it, I was told to let white musk drip on my wrists for it was a healthy, luminous smell.
And then,
Christine.
One of the first songs I wrote, built over musical loops on my computer, was a curious rhapsody on the will to be saved by my own fluids, all odorous : sweat, blood, saps, everything they carefully try to scrape off young girl’s skins. Deafening angers as I was skimming through our magazines ; is that all that we’re destined to ? I only saw in there some cruel manual on how to properly disappear.
My room always had empty walls.
The window was the only appeal ; I glanced at the pavement below.
And I envied them – the boys – with their embraces.
Foreheads touching as if they were about to merge, hands on the back of their neck : everything could settle with a kiss – the lips are already so close – but they always chose the violent assent of a fight. Something was promised in their breathlessness – something that pursued me until nightfall.
That was already Christine at the window, with burning, curious eyes.
Now,
I’m done with assenting. I’m done with pleasing the eye.
My face, at the time, was ribbed with fury ; it was acne melted to my own scratches. I then tried to make myself up in tears, bended over the mirror, with lights so dim I could hardly see. I felt deeply impure, and along with impurity came fears – dreads of being sick, dreads of zenithal suns, dreads of being up close. Christine was a detonation, a brutal irruption of light in my tiny flat.
I suddenly appeared, rough and brave in that same mirror, but now with another face : one of an upset little squire.
If it felt impossible to play by the rules, I’ll infect them all ;
My disease would became chaos, and this chaos would became highly contagious.
Sun hurtling down everything, almost vibratile in its intensity,
My flat upside down, reveled in the brightness of a different spring.
Any chaos will trigger two seconds of pure joy.
I repeat : any chaos will trigger two seconds of pure joy.
Outside, kids with hoarse voices, scars as stains of their own power. I would eventually belong there.
My perfume
is already on my skin.
And now, I’m one with the stream !
Their women don’t exist. They suck the idea of their women out of their very neck – then it bleeds. My eroticism is precisely what sets me free of those skimpy limits, this gender I’m assigned to ; I desired them all, but never with the same sex.
(Of course I’m not going to make it easy on you with lazy definitions. I plan to enrage you, to always escape. Here come the winds ! )
I don’t know how to keep myself together.
I only make sense when I move – look at my fluttering hands ! They’re telling the truth !
And when I dance,
my face arrives.
The calmness with which muses parade their faces infuriates me. They’re made of fragile milks, nested in our hands.
Note of the 12th of February 2016 (I think I was in Paris) : can’t stand faces anymore.
Mine keeps on contradicting itself, sometimes of a juvenile smoothness, sometimes rumbling with doubts ; brutally damaged even, under indirect lights — I’ve got the face of a young skateboarder who’s just ploughed into the city, holding a beer with his fingertips.
I’m nowhere, if not for the teenagers.
Pockmarked face,
Purple blemishes near the mouth, pinkish reliefs on the temple,
the terrible cruelty of the day they bravely dive into,
the sweetness of their ass, and the roughness of their cheeks,
and those dreadful mugs at daybreak that all of us together decide to ignore,
the sheer beauty of their pitted faces, so fragile during cold spells,
tremendous outbursts which further confirm the silent truth of emotion.
I want them all, and I’m in all of them at the same time.
My lips are red and full in the early morning; my tired eyes squint under the twilight sun. If I were your friend, you’d find something handsome in my wounds. You’d take me down by the riverside, and you’d try to get me to fight you. For a second, you’d be surprised by my agility ; you’d let me take a few swings before the knockout. There and then, with my head in the wet grass and blood on my lips,
I’d understand just how much you love me.
Amongst our clique, I’d be the sickly one, who’s arm’s only half-twisted ; the one who gets to talk late at night, fidgeting a story that excites all of the others.
See, what I’m obsessed about is to liberate, stitch by stitch (cause the embroidery’s intricate and flecked with their own blood), all the girls of the proper way to be a girl.
It’s unescapable : very early, words and attitudes cluster you ; the female is always threatened, either by enclavement or pure dissolution. The most stinging punishment of all is to be casted out of what is fuckable. The criterions are narrow and cruel, to maintain us as inactive as possible. Our clothes are shaped to refrain our bodies from expanding, our pills are swallowed in the name of what must be regulated, our hygienes are yelled as necessary ; as for our desires, they’re suffocated the very moment they arise – remember the insults thrown at the face of those who kissed eagerly !
Facetuned Pythias. Such a turn on.
What do instagram’s goddesses do ? They’re anointed – there’s always new pigments.
Cautiously sticking some flowers on the craters of their cheeks, they ornate the ravages of youth as much as they can
Daydreams of runway
Loaded.
The temptation’s always there, because this hurling void never stops ; it calls at you, and it’s so very hard to escape its force-field :
They must love what they see.
And what about me ?
Do you even think I love thee ?
If I’m a sister to women that carry the sword,
I’m also the sister of the hungry ones.
Madonna, in this documentary of the nineties – keen muscles, undulating under her skin. Immense hotel suite, cutting carves. She devours a salad specially concocted for her, then shuts the tupperware down with authority only after a few agressive bites – she is predatory, she is alone, she is being watched, but more importantly, she is filled with desire.
In bed with her dancers, both maternal and famished, she asks for the goodnight kiss to be on her lips.
I’m a mutant. What I swallow can’t be traced.
Overexcited by the street’s metallic views, nose up in the winds of december, I allow myself to stay out, without any clear purpose. I kept for myself masculine delights, such as strolling and wandering about ; I occupy now the public space with the relaxed muscles of those whom rule, unthreatened.
See how lions move.
This is precisely what I crave for :
the leader’s liquid gait.
I, a tennisman who clutches his fist shortly after match point ; I, a footballer who sways his index nonchalantly after scoring a goal.
Watch me steal the time-worn parades of your manhood, and turn them into something way more suspicious.
My horizon is Orlando’s wild surges.
In the secret of my room, my dancer’s muscles roll forward whilst something else unfolds. I silently train to escape.
I only sit on chairs close to the door, I ditched heels, I aim for speed, emergency exits, shortcuts – it’s not that I feel guilty, but like Genet’s infamous thieves, I wish to remain free.
Women with a sword, women with an appetite, women with a revenge, bloody witch : everything she’s asked to buy, she just told you she doesn’t want it.
Extract from magazine EGOISTE N°18 – TOME II, MARCH 2018
Updated/maj. 19-08-2018
Vues : 23
