They gave the boys the soldier with the eagle eye
And the hollow crotch
The Action Man with the scar on his cheek and the kung-fu grip
A plastic preview of the violence they would later call protection.
We were the static brides in the cardboard boxes
The ones with the painted-on knickers
And the legs that never bent.
They taught us the shape of our servitude
Before we could even spell the word.
A dress rehearsal for the pleasure of the architects
Who carved us into the little men and little women they needed
To fill the kitchens of the houses they built for us.
They defined us by the weight of the air between our thighs
A cacophony of silence where the map was blank
But the borders were strictly enforced.
We grew up in a house of euphemisms
Where the body was a series of rooms, we were forbidden to enter.
They taught us to be defined by our genitals
Whilst never giving us the language to name them.
But in the shadows of the toy chest, we were already playing rebellion.
Every girl grinding the smooth, desexed absences of plastic doll together
Mimicking the wet, raw friction of lesbian pornography
The moralists call filth whilst they hide the cellar key.
We sought the pulse that was missing from the injection-moulded nothing
Trying to spark a fire from the blank territory of our assigned roles.
Every boy wondering if the soldier’s kung-fu grip
Could hold the sailor’s cock in the dark behind the sofa.
We were born with the glitch
A raw hunger for the unmapped before they drew the lines across our skin.
The architects of the toy chest are the same men in the surplice
They built the box, and then they built the cell
To keep the glitch from spreading like a fever.
The moralist stands at the pulpit with a cellar full of ghosts
The same architect who built the nursery with a hidden lock
He looks for the stain on the sheet
Whilst hiding the bruise on the child.
He smells of damp hymnals and stale sweat
A man who prays for the purity of the cage
Whilst his own hands are black with the soot of the sinner.
They call the open field a slut because it refuses the fence
Because it welcomes the rain and the wild trampling of the wind.
They fear the person who owns their own heart
Because they are the only mirror that reflects the rot.
They scream of sin in the extra-large bed
Whilst they bury the scream in the floorboards of the manse.
They seat us at the table of their respectability
With the polished silver and the starched white lies.
We are the centrepiece of their hollow ceremonies
The tokens of a peace they bought with our silence.
But the table is just another border
A line drawn between the civilised and the wild
Where the price of the meal is the name of your desire.
I am spitting out the wine of their communion
It tastes of the copper of the child’s bruise
And the cold iron of the cage they call home.
The Barbie fantasy was a down payment on a life sentence
A pink-tinted blueprint for a prison
Where the windows were painted on
And the door only opened for the man with the key.
Now the ring is the final lock on the door
A small circle of gold that shuts out the wild grass of my desire.
Tradition is a slow-motion theft
A contract signed in the dark, where the state is the third person in the bed
Taking notes on the frequency of my submission.
Your love is a cage with velvet bars
And you are the warden who thinks he is a saint
Because he remembers to feed the bird.
I want to rip the plastic from the bone
To feel the friction of the pulse before the shame.
I want the wet raw truth of the anatomy they tried to bury
The names that taste like iron and salt on the tongue.
I want the heavy ache of a devotion that has no master
The slow burn of a body that has finally found its own voice.
My skin is a riot of unmapped territory
A landscape of scars and heat that refuses to be settled
By the clerk’s cold eye or the owner’s heavy hand.
But in the dark, I found the glitch in the plastic.
I found the heat of a mouth that does not belong to a soldier
A mouth that answers no dead name
A tongue tracing the names they tried to bury in the silt of our shame.
I want the slide of your sweat against mine
The desperate friction of a rebellion that starts in the gut.
I want to feel the weight of their heart against my back
Whilst my mouth is occupied with the salt of your skin.
This desire is a riot in the groin of the state
A jagged refusal to be the quiet ledger for your patriarchal history.
When I press my skin against theirs
I am reclaiming the blood and the power of my own flesh
Turning the bedroom into a liberated zone.
I want the tangle of many hands and the heat of many mouths
The messy, glorious chaos of a love that refuses the singular.
This is not a collection of moments but a shared architecture of love
A collective pulse that drowns out the moralist’s drone.
The singular was a starvation diet. I am an insurrection of appetites
That your narrow law could never feed.
They do not understand the weight of a heart because they only know the price of a contract.
We are the ones who know what love is
Because we have seen it survive the cage and the cellar and the bleached sheets.
Our love is the only thing that isn't pre-fabricated.
The city is a wet lung, coughing up the debris of suburban life.
The paper trails are burning in the gutters, the ink running like blood.
I can smell the damp rot of the soul as the foundations buckle.
In this ruin, our pleasure is the sound of bricks hitting the boardroom window.
We are the names you forgot to write down, rising like the stench of hot grease and old grudges
Moving across the flesh borders you tried to draw on our souls.
I am done with the bleached sheets and the polite silences.
I want the disgusting freedom of the unowned.
I want the dirty, messy joy of the unindexed.
Give me the spit and the sweat and the raw friction of the road.
Give me the salt of the insurrection on my lips.
Unheld.
Unowned.
Unsanitised.
I am the fire you left burning in the bed you tried to burn.
I am the wet, raw scream you buried under the floorboards.
I am the glitch.
I am the riot.
I am the legs that will never close for your rules.
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