Queer is a disruption

We are the disruptors

Young queer people

We're space architects

Imagineers

Creating spaces that destroy our fears

We survive in spaces where we thrive

and our beauty comes alive

 

Yet these spaces we create, we animate

by constant self-policing

Say the right thing

Body image

We’re feeling quite oppressed ourselves

 

Early noughties in my early twenties

Kings Arms Soho

I discovered bears and cubs don’t just live in the forest

 

I could feel the words in the stare of this most uptight bear

‘You could do with losing a few’

but the only thing I was losing was my mind

Always two steps forward, always two steps back

Bullied at school for being gay, now bullied by gays for being wrong fat

A community that preaches ‘Be Yourself!’

‘Be you, but not you’. How fucked up is that

 

Just when I thought I had finally caught

the eye of a rather nice guy

as I stood at the bar with my Stella Artois

He made me think he may buy me a drink

come over and ask when I was here last

and finally extinguish parts of my past

You found the matches

Your coldness pushed me back into the heat of the fire

and flames of those playground games that names and shames

those who do not aspire

to be Mr Muscular hyphen Heteronormative

Thank you Mr How-to- Kill- Desire

 

Through his Bacardi and coke and cigarette smoke, this excuse

for a bloke cracked joke after joke

‘Blue eyed boy Lee, I love your dark hairy legs

Shame the rest of your frame is lard pie from Greggs

Be more like me, on spinach and eggs

You can’t be a cub, you’re far too old

Put those legs out on show, if you want to get sold

 

I’m getting quite tripped

on these bodies all ripped

Imagine mine stripped

and everything flipped

 

Mr Spinach and Eggs,

stick your rules and regs

in the hole

at the back

of the top of my legs   

 

Smash the fads

Rip the body mags

 

We are a community, anti-being controlled

Yet there are those who are persistently told

‘You are too slim to be fat, too fat to be that ‘

When will we get over the labels and stereotypes and just

Be?

 

To all you body gamers, shamers, namers and blamers

Don’t define us guys by our bodily size

To the body police, we’re flippin’ ginormous

What is obese, what is enormous

is the size of our talent to craft what we say

As poets we’re gallant at clever wordplay

 

Stick your rules and regs, your spinach and eggs

in the hole

at the back

of the top of our legs