Poem: Teeth

I've wanted to write this poem for a long time. After having the privilege of performing at the recent Live Poets Society event in Swansea and seeing a host of other amazing writers and performers, I knew that it was time. It's taken a few weeks and drafts, but I'm dating it for the 16th October, 2022.

CW: explicit mention and description of sexual assault, description of gore.

Teeth:

I have teeth. They show when I am angry

or afraid, lips peeling back and gums flashing.

I know when

to hide them, but it is not always easy; sometimes,

I feel as though I could peel my lips back all the way

around my body,

until I am nothing but teeth, a gleaming slavering

wreckage, ready to shred and tear and never

be touched again.

 

I have a tattoo of a jaguar skull on my hip, which

I got to remind myself in its snarl that I have teeth

to defend myself.

Did I forget to use them? He told me

if I really didn’t want it that I should have kicked

(I did;

You should have kicked harder, then) –

but maybe the truth is, I should have bitten,

rendered, torn. A jaguar’s

bite is neat and quick; I am not a jaguar. I do not

have her grace, her allure, I am not smooth

and feminine and lithe.

 

When I think of my gleaming bared teeth and

glowing hungry eyes, I think instead of a hyena.

A hyena is not

a dog, and not quite a cat, and I am not a woman

and not quite a man, something else, cast aside

with the aspersions

of, I hate men – and I understand, believe me,

after what I have tasted of womanhood –

then quickly amended,

Not you, of course, and of course not, because

you meant bad men, you meant cis men, straight men,

you meant real men.

 

I bare my teeth when I am scared, duck my

head, flatten my ears, and let out the nervous

cackle of submission

and excitement. But when I am hungry…

then the beast is a slavering thing. I dream of using

my teeth to tear out

the throat of the man who dared to crack open

my friend like a honeycomb and suck the

sweetness from within;

wake up jubilant in the heat and wetness of feasting

on his flesh; slowly come around to the disappointment

of knowing I cannot

lacerate the life from his body if he ever knocks

on our door. I preach kindness, but there’s only

so many times

you can whisper, I wish I could make the pain

go away, before you start to wonder if teeth could do

what hands cannot.

 

It’s a war against women, the play declares,

how can men get away with this?, and my voice

is not welcome,

because I have forsaken womanhood, I have

forsaken victimhood, to join the side of the

oppressors. A friend

of a friend performs a ten minute piece about

being a male survivor of sexual abuse, has

such scorn for women

because #MeToo did not include him,

and I do not want my voice to carry the same

hatred as his,

especially when he turns around and snarls

to my face that I do not deserve to stand beside

him because

I chose this. I was still a woman to him, trying

to steal what little platform he had been given

because I wasn’t

content with what I had. He had so much hate,

not for the people who had hurt him, but for the

people who had

refused to listen. I understand, I want to say;

I am not the girl you see before you, but he

does not want to hear.

He flashes his teeth, and I do not dare show mine.

He is not the one who hurt me, not in that way.

I will not try

to taste the blood of someone who is just

showing their teeth because they, too,

are scared.

 

Someone says, People don’t listen to women who

are sexually assaulted, and someone else says,

People don’t care

about men who are sexually assaulted, and they’re not

listening to each other. Fact: women are 15 times more

likely to be sexually

assaulted than men. Fact: only 1.3% of men accused of

sexual assault are taken to court, and only 0.6% are then

convicted.

Fact: these facts do not account for the fact that in the UK,

it is legal for someone to force a man to penetrate

them without

his consent. Fact: there are only three charities in the UK for male

survivors of sexual assault, compared to over a hundred

for women.

Fact: all of these things are true, and I slip through the

cracks of all the truths, not a woman, and not quite

a man,

and maybe, if you picture me as something

else, you will care: picture me as the helpless, innocent

animal that, fact,

did not ask for this, that could not defend itself, pinned down

by his hand over my mouth, my muzzle, his whispered,

Sssshhhhh,

as he fucked me, and I lay and waited for it to be over;

picture me a lamb, a dog, a cat, anything but a man

who is not really

a man, and maybe someone will care, but the truth

is this: I am not any of those things. I am a transgender

gay man who was raped

by a cisgender straight man. There is no social movement

for me. Being a man did not stop it from happening. He will

never be convicted.

 

The night I performed a piece about it for the first time,

thirty people I used to call friend held a party in support of him

opposite my house.

They, mostly women, called me liar and jealous and whore.

Weeks later, when another story broke on the news and the

world burned

with the new trend, they covered their social media with posts

about how important it is to listen to women’s voices

when talking

about sexual assault. I wanted to be gentle, but for weeks

after I was nothing but teeth. I earned a reputation for biting

without provocation.

Wild animals don’t bite without provocation, we just don’t know

how to read the warning signs. Safer to muzzle than to try

and understand.

 

I have teeth. They show when I am afraid

or angry. You can say, “Stop,” as many times

as you like,

but some people will only listen to a bite. My ex

would pin me down while I asked over and over for

him to let me go,

until the animal fear of it would kick in and I fought

free like a beast. He would wail and whine that I

was wild, dangerous,

that I deserved to be muzzled. Perhaps I should have

torn his throat out with my teeth. But I do not want

to be made

of this blood and fury. I suppose all I have is my

voice and my teeth. But I am not alone. I will not

go quietly.

There is only so long I can hold my grief and fury

inside. Eventually, everyone learns that they, too,

have teeth.

Playlists for the Public

We're still a long way from City being anywhere near to published, or even publicised at this point, but it is the point of considering what that publicity will look like. I mean heck, the darn thing needs a title first, but my brain's primary fixation recently has been on the playlist.

I always have a writing playlist for each story which is around four hours long. It typically starts as a few full albums which have very different vibes from each other but cover everything I feel for the story at the time, which very quickly is trimmed of the songs I don't enjoy as much, and then has more specific songs added, one or two at a time, over the entire time I'm writing for it. The end result is something that can fade into the background while I write but which keeps me in the headspace of the story or characters.

This is different to the official playlist for the novel, which are the ones I post on here, such as in the Sylvestus playlist deep dive I wrote; those are curated to around 1.5 hours from the larger ones, and tend to be more specific to the story and characters.

I'm pretty sure this isn't the first time I've mentioned - it's challenging going from one PoV character to five. It changes the pace, but it also changes the tone of the story, how they see the world. This is reflected for sure in the playlist; I wouldn't say that it has the most diverse genres of any of my writing playlists, but there are definitely some songs which have a vibe or theme very specific to one character, or several, or all except one, or were intended for one but now fit another, while others remain more neutral to the setting or the tone of the story itself. I've already decided that it's going to be one "official" playlist for the novel, rather than one per character - easier to promote, and also leaves some mystery and room for interpretation. And, although it's still a long way away, I'm already planning every time I listen which ones are going to make it.

Oh, there'll be edit upon edit and late additions and sudden cuts, but it's an exciting process, to highlight what absolutely must be used to represent this character, or recognise how key a tone-setter a particular artist was early on.

There's a need to justify, to exhibit, when it's the official playlist. I never claim to have good taste in music (I now disclaim to anyone I'm giving a lift to that as the driver, I get to choose the music, and I make no apology for what crap may come) but the official playlist is saying: this is the headspace I was in when writing. This is what I want you to feel when you read. This is what this story is, who these characters are. In many ways, it's more insightful than a blurb.

 

In contrast, I was listening to my Sylv writing playlist the other day. It largely consists of Halsey, Sia, and Fall Out Boy - in contrast, the official playlist has one Halsey song, no Sia, and no FOB. Almost every Florence + the Machine and Rag'n'Bone Man and Cage the Elephant song on the writing playlist made it onto the official one, because they were specific and key to the writing - but it was Halsey, Sia, and FOB which made the majority of my background listening while writing, which set the tone of the early days.

Right now, the City writing playlist is six and a half hours long, made about 50% up of Lorde, Melanie Martinez, Halsey again, and Twenty-One Pilots. How many of those will make it onto the official playlist? I imagine at least one or two of each, but I doubt much more.

There was, to be fair, a conundrum I faced when finalising the official Sylvestus playlist around the publication of Vol II.

Sia, as I mentioned, makes up a large chunk of the writing playlist, and her music was very important from the start for the headspace of Sylv. She writes a lot about sexual trauma and family and lashing out from it, and those are very Sylv things. There isn't exactly the same market right now of male songs about those subjects. And right before the publication of Sylv Vol II, she came out saying some pretty shitty things about autistic people.

Problematic and cancelled and performative activism are so ugh right now, and have been for a few years, which is why I didn't even touch it at the time. I kept Sia songs on the playlist until the last possible minute, because they were so important for Sylv to me, and then I took them off shortly before the Deep Dive post because at the time I worked in support for children with learning disabilities, and I have many autistic friends, and it felt like directly shitting on them to be like "lol nah f*ck u tho, still gonna promote her music cos i like it xox". Similarly, if someone shamelessly pulls out Harry Potter stuff and shoves it at me, I immediately am on edge and do not trust that person. I, a trans person of Jewish heritage, do not personally believe that you should burn all of your old HP merch and never re-watch the movies or read the books if you enjoy them, but I also do not trust someone who proudly declares that they support and adore an antisemitic, anti-abortion, racist transphobe and her works.

But as soon as I decide, Okay, someone's music can be excluded from this playlist because of a shitty thing they said - well, now we're in a whole new territory.

Twenty-One Pilots haven't (to my knowledge) ever been explicitly homophobic, but they refuse to disavow the homophobia of the church they were raised in. Melanie Martinez and Halsey have both been accused of sexual assault. Kesha wrote a transphobic song many years ago. Brendan Urie of Panic! at the Disco is a bit of a dick. Frank Iero from My Chemical Romance frequently said fetishistic things about Asian women on their 2007 tour. P!nk did a collab with Eminem even though he's been accused of domestic violence. And all of those still feature on my writing or official playlists and I still enjoy listening to all of their music. And I'm not exactly out here running background checks of every single artist I've ever listened to!

So, where's the line? Maybe it's short-sighted, but for me it's in direct hurt.

Me listening to Sia, as a few tracks on a five hour playlist, by myself while driving or writing, makes her about 0.000001p per stream and provides a negative impact for precisely no-one. Me putting her on a playlist a few weeks after she says horrible things about autistic people and then shoving it in the faces of my autistic friends who have expressed hurt over what she said? That's hurtful. It's not me hiding things or giving into peer pressure; it's me saying, I care about you, so I am not going to subject you to this right now.

A friend watching a DVD of their favourite Harry Potter movie to comfort themselves after a bad day? That's... not doing any harm. People happily and without critical thought paying obscene amounts of money for a new Harry Potter game which explicitly promotes antisemitism and provides a platform for someone who openly uses that money to campaign against trans rights in the UK? That is directly harming me.

 

I don't know where the line is. I doubt there is one. It's a river, shifting back and forth with the seasons, changing over time and sometimes making a weird little Oxbow lake.

Everything is problematic. Everything has an effect on the world. Both are true. Make your impact something good, eh?