wisb-Guardian-Express

Yes, I have become an emo poet.  Whatever.  Personal bullshit compels me to write things that reflect the confusion crap going on in my head, even if said poems don't make sense.

Do with this what you will...

Here goes:

Quiet chambers
dead in night
blank, empty of voices:
Dead!
Dead inside.
A rustling -- rodent,
scourge of the earth.
Black pierced by sword eyes.
Piercing.
Piercing souls, life itself.

Empty.  Numb.
Numb like the corpses,
the mother who loses everyone to a war.
Empty.
Death streaking on the walls of hearts.
The pieces broken,
the puzzle collapsed by moisture.
Quiet chambers where day and night are suspended by nothing.

I don't feel like prefacing this with a grand explanation.  I'm having a shit day.

So here's a poem I wrote for NaPo.  That is all:

A chickadee fee-bees
into the monstrous
sea-green sleeves
reaching up for the sun:
a photosynthesis love song.
But no voices hear him,
for the grasslands are barren.

His voice cries out regardless --
fee-bee fee-bee tsit tsit --
hoping that the low-flying wind
slapping the ingers together
will carry his voice
to verdant lands --
tseedleedeet chicka-dee-dee-dee --
where new feathers perform their own journeys.
To no avail -- they dream
for something else
than what their lands can provide.
That hope sustains his voice
like a honey drizzle
on the vocal chords --
fee-bee fee-bee.

But there are no verdan fields
and no lonely ones peering out
                       for him.
He whistles his song
until he can no more,
until his throad cracks blood,
his chest burning, ashen,
no longer supporting
the moss-tinged air.

Who will hear his voice
when he no longer
sends it out on winds
twirling with life?
Or does he sing anything at all
if there is nobody around
              to hear him,
like the fable of the tree.

The chickadee lies down in the grass,
unable, unwilling to speak,
silenced by ghosts
of unfulfilled promises.

Fantasy Book Cafe has been releasing some fascinating articles in celebration of its "Women in SF/F" month (thing, event?).  One such article by the always-compelling N. K. Jemisin, entitled "Don't Fear the Unicorn," concerns Jemisin's personal struggle with the culturally-imposed gender paradigms in genre fiction.  Specifically, girly unicorns of girly-ness on the cover of Steven R. Boyett's Ariel.  I recommend you read the entire article, but for the sake of context, here's a juicy quote:

So I wasn’t going to pick up Ariel because OMG unicorn no. But there was something else on the cover of that book next to the unicorn: a boy. 

I remember staring at that book for several seconds of full, total “does not compute” shutdown. My brain just couldn’t handle the paradox. Unicorns equalled girliness. Boys, however, signalled action and adventure and toughness and purpose. Boys don’t do unicorns. Girliness =/= purpose. Danger, Will Robinson, danger. 

Then I clearly remember thinking, but I’m a girl. 

And that was it. It wasn’t an especially shocking realization, but it was a profound one. In that moment I began to understand: the problem wasn’t that some books were infested with girl cooties; the real problem was my irrational fear of girliness. And myself.

Hopefully that explains why the title of this post involves the willing emasculation of my male self  both by unicorn riding and cross-dressing.  Not that I would ever do either (we live in the real world, folks, so this whole cross-dressing unicorn rider of doom nonsense is just a fantasy I will never see fulfilled).

But the point is that I too find these paradigms rather disconcerting, except in retrospect.  While Jemisin seems to have discovered the idiocy of the girl/boy split and the wickedness of girl cooties at a young age, I didn't discover such a thing until maybe my early twenties.  I blame part of that on the culture around me, wherein being an RPG-playing, video-game-loving, Magic-the-Gathering-obsessed super geek (we drank Citra by the box -- you remember Citra, right?) constituted some kind of penis-wearing female surrogate monster (like an android without genitalia, or, maybe, with male genitalia, since we menfolk have this odd obsession with feeling inadequate to the task of "mating").  Growing up, then, put me in a bizarre position of trying to pretend that I was "man enough" to be considered a "man" (or young man, depending on my age), thereby legitimizing my hard rejection of anything associated with the female species (even when such things are, in fact, gender neutral -- dancing, for example, is only "girly" because men are too damned stupid to realize that most forms of dancing don't actually work without a partner; partners could very well be of the same sex or either sex -- such is the silliness of girl cooties).

Today, I've thankfully set a lot of this crap aside.  Perhaps it has something to do with recognizing (and learning) patriarchy in our culture.  Perhaps it has something to do with a desire to access "girly things" because I happen to like them (hey, a good romance is, well, good, and I'm going to cry at the end of a tragedy or whatever because it's sad; so bite me).  It might also have something to do with my semi-bi-sexual-ness (yeah, I'm admitting that in public on a blog; I'm as confused as you).

Whatever led me to this conclusion -- to the desire to ride a unicorn in the dress because I should be able to do so without getting ridiculed for being "a girl" (because it ain't a girl thing; it's a human thing) -- I am thankful to see people like Jemisin challenging the assumptions of gendered identity.  There's no such thing as a "domain of *insert sex here.*"  Women like sports; men like sports.  Men like cooking; women do too (and on that front, I have to ask:  has anyone else found it utterly absurd that the most sexist of us all can say "women belong in the kitchen" without recognizing the irony that some of the best cooks are men?  Some are women too, of course, but anyway...).

Jemisin, of course, is right.  We're all sexists.  We're raised in a sexist society.  And we should challenge those behaviors when we become aware of them, not because it will suddenly make us non-sexist, but because it will help us make a fairer world.  That applies to our reading practices.  If a book has a unicorn on it, give it a shot.  You never know.  It might be the most amazing book you've ever read.  But you'll never know if you don't pick up that book, look at the blurb, and give it a shot.

That's what I've got to say on that.  The comments are yours.

Today's NaPo poem was not actually inspired by the picture in this post.  Rather, it was inspired by some random thoughts I have about cats, which includes thinking of them as slave masters.  The poem isn't explicitly humorous, though.

In any case, here's the poem (feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts or a link to your own NaPo entry):

Bow before your master...

I don't feel like prefacing this with an explanation.  So I'm just going to get right to it:

I prepare myself to pack away my dreams
into the snowglobe of a lost memory.
Our fingers intertwined, like beds
of fallen leaves warming a frosty earth.
The little laughs shared in stone courtyards,
where too many feet have marched
to the sound of war drums --
our laughter replenishes the weary
souls trapped in a moment of history.

The way your eyes gleam when I kneel,

even though I always said I wouldn't
because it's too cliche and we should
strive to be something more than that.
But I couldn't help myself, the dreary
winter rain of England trapping moisture
in my cargo pants as the words slip from my tongue
and the oath slides into place.
The tears we share together that night
when your lips offer affirmations
and our nervous smiles betray our joy
to the voyeurs of the world.

The single joyous moment when you
cross the threshold on the arms of an angel;
I stand there, sweaty palms, my crazy
mother in the corner sobbing over a grin --
we both know she's lost her marbles
in all the right ways --
and words are exchanged under an arch
of artificial flowers -- because you're
allergic to the real deal and I
made the day just for you so you'd
always remember...

The first moment when your worried face
shows me the right colors/lines/truths
in the third plastic stick you've tried.
I hardly contain my excitement, like a
child getting the right toy at Christmas,
but always and forever, every day and thereafter,
and then I'm running across the parking lot,
screaming at anyone who will listen,
even if their faces betray my absurdity.
I sweep you up into my arms
with a thousand kisses and thank yous.
We were happy that day.

The birth, the growth, and the sudden
realization that there are so many
things nobody ever told us about
anything we should have learned
about when we were younger.
There are fights and bitter remarks,
pain and tears and too much food
in places it's not supposed to end up...
But at night we read little stories --
I do all the voices, and you try not
to laugh at how ridiculous I sound --
and battle the wits of the young
in the grand game of sleep politics.
We soldier through, because the little troopers
with unusual names we've concucted
in the imagination of love
need us as much as we need them.
We remind ourselves that we can handle it.
Our mothers remind us that they'll
gladly donate their services.

The little hand of a raggedy boy
squeezing the life out of too
many imaginary demons in the woods out back.
Somewhere his sister plays with her dolls,
or maybe she's squeezing imaginary demons too,
perhaps in solidarity or because she's
too much like her monther when she was young.
He's a right pain in the ass --
so much like his father (or mother, or both) --
and she's a royal princess
who isn't sure she wants to be a princess at all.
But we make do, because there's something
about this journey that reminds us
we've still got a long way to go
before we reach whatever great epiphany
awaits the end...

The demon-smashing boy brings his own
demon-smashers to the party, and before long
the demon-smashers are followed by more.
Whatever we think about the choices
the original demon-smashers made,
we're too happy to have more demon-smashers
in our little cottage in the country to care
-- or little house in the city,
depending on how our dreams turned out.
So our living room is filled with toys
and our guest bedrooms turn out to be
perfect havens for the new demon-smashers
to rest off their demon-furies.
We read them bedtime stories, too,
and tell their parents that we'd
happily donate our services.
The former-demon-smashers smile at us,
because they remember when they too
were fodder for the services of the elderly.

The first time you really realized
that we have grown far too old,
but that we're still just as happy
as we ever were, even with the wrinkles
and dwindling health.
We spend our days in the living room,
reading books, watching TV we don't understand,
remarking on how when we were younger
we never got into all that whatsamacallits
and some such whatever majigs.
The former-demon-smashers roll their eyes
when they're privvy to the conversation,
but sooner or latter, they'll get it too.

Somewhere in all of this, you'll own
that little bookshop I told you about
when I made up that ridiculous story.
Tinkers and Pages Magical Emporium of Tinker Toys and Books:
you'll call it that because I came up
with the name in a fit of imagination,
and you can't help yourself, after all.
We'll throw our life savings into it
because it's what we want to do with
the rest of our long, beautiful lives.
We'll be giants in our own little world,
so sure that the trees beneath our feet
won't prick us into submission.

All these thoughts, like sunbursts of color
spreading outward into a fan of possibilities,
slip down from the tip of a wand
into my own little pensieve,
the wizard love song that was always ours
dwindling away in the background
where the shadows encroach --
shadows of what used to be,
of the demon-smashers and their adorable grins...
In the snowglobe, I see the futures
we might have had lying in wait,
perhaps to be drawn out again,
or deferred for another day.
But whatever days are lost in the memory of you,
I'll hold the snowglobe in my pocket,
a bookmark for one moment of wonder.

Hooray for poems about birds!  Nature rocks.

Today's poem was inspired by the following:

The warbling Northern Mockingbird
chirps a stranger's tune,
acid words spilling from his beak:
"HUMAN...Human...human...safe!"

Others announce my arrival in turn,
turning their beaks to the side
so their blackberry eyes
can see the world beneath their wings.
"human...Human...HUMAN!"
I watch them, curious at their undying attention,
like the reverse end of a lover's coin.
"Human...human...safe!"

Who am I to these air sirens?
Who do I become in their eyes?
"Move away...Move away...Move away now..."
There, the mother hen clucking her little orders;
There, the little whisper of the Earth mother
serenading the world with wild harmonies.
"human...Human...HUMAN!"

I look in their beads of ethereal visions
and see myself reflected as if by an ocean.
"Human...human...safe!"
And in that moment, I see myself,
the bird man waiting to fly
on skies of upturned buckets,
toes wriggling in the fog where feathers play.

Ticonderoga Publications is currently reading for an anthology called Dreaming of Djinn.  All well and good, right?  Things get rather strange, however, when you read the description:

This anthology, with the working title Dreaming of Djinn, will look at romantic Orientalism through a speculative fiction lens. You might find lost cities, magical lamps, mummies, thieves, intrepid explorers, slaves, robotic horsemen, noble queens, sorcerers, outcast princes, harems, dancers, djinn, assassins and even smart-talking camels and cats, set in exotic Persia, Egypt, Arabia, the Ottoman Empire, or a modern incarnation of these.

Oh boy, here we go!

The Middle East isn't exotic.  The oceans of Europa are exotic, because fuck-all lives there; if you stuck someone in them, I suspect their first reaction would be "Holy shit, I'm miles under ice in an ocean on another planet."  Hell, even the oceans on Earth are exotic for the same reason ("Holy
shit, I'm inside a submarine in the Marianas Trench!").  People live in the Middle East, that oh-so-exotic place with all the different countries and peoples and histories (it's a country like Africa, right?  Right?  Ha!).  I know, that's shocking, right?  Maybe I should say "people."  That's better.  That way you can question whether they are people, since they're all exotic and whatever.

Unless, of course, if you take your head out of your ass and you realize that, hey, people from the Middle East live in this country, and other Western countries, and many of them have kids, so to say "oh, hey, those weird people from Persia are exotic weirdos" is sort of like saying "My left arm is strange, but my right one is el normal!"  And that's really the problem.  Are there "exotic" cultures on this planet?  I don't know.  I don't know about all the cultures on this planet.  I'm sure there are cultures that seem strange to me, but I'm in tune with my own reality enough to know that that opinion is not relevant because it is subjective.  Other cultures are exotic because they are not my own culture.

And this is really the problem of Orientalism as Edward Said articulated it, and as so many academics and non-academics alike now understand it.  The moment we start producing these binaries, in which one culture is "normal" and the other is "exotic" (read:  savage, wrong, not-us, etc.), then we are engaging in orientalist behavior.  That the editors used Orientalism in the description without noting this profound irony is disconcerting.

I'm sure they mean well, and that what they really want is to find are stories which show pulpy adventures taking place in the Middle East and other places once identified as part of "the Orient."  There's nothing wrong with that; it's even a pretty good idea.  But I certainly hope they think through the implications of their call for stories, or they might end up with an actual anthology of Orientalist Romances, chock full of racism, ethnocentric stereotypes, and so on.  Something like this:
Anywho...


What does everyone else think about this?