Hill Mosque Corbyn

Prelude Two: Honeymoon

He hates the screen on the back of the camera, the new one they bought for this holiday. This honeymoon. He stands by a lighthouse under a grey Pacific sky and tries to smile. She shows him the screen. He looks too much of a shlub in this hoody, these baggy combats. He looks like the light hurts his eyes in every picture. He can't even defer his disappointment til the photos are developed.

He used to travel alone. Went to Paris on his own like the girl in that Tori Amos b-side, Bachelorette. And the first time he went to New York he was alone. He never photographed himself: just Wilde's grave, Isadora Duncan's plaque, Ground Zero. He remembers walking down a street in Paris, looking at a poster for some porno comics exhibition stuck in a shop window, a woman with long nails standing in a wrestler's crouch, and catching sight of his own reflection behind it. Stubble. Almost beard. He looked like a tramp, tried to step aside, get out of his own way.

In the wedding photos, cutting the cake, they both look amazing. She does of course, with her white dress and her hair up, smiling with all of her face; and him with the long hair and suit that makes him look like a lesbian, like this is some kind of butch/femme deal and maybe convention dictates they should both be in suits for a lesbian wedding but screw THAT, life is too short for femmephobia and who says dykes CAN'T get married in dresses, huh?

He loves looking at that photo.

On their first night in New York he watches a cartoon on the hotel room TV while she showers. Lying on the impossibly huge American bed he watches a child molester in a dress sing a parody of a song from Little Shop of Horrors. He doesn't know why exactly but this cartoon makes him feel unbearably sad. He seems so lonely, the man singing on the TV, even the audience are meant to see him as a joke. A sick joke.

Are you alright, she asks him, towelling her hair.

I'm fine, he answers. Just tired.

Potential

First Prelude: Grief

I want you all to fuck me.

I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me, and I want you to fuck me and you get the idea. I want you all to fuck me.

I want you all to chain me up against a wall and use me. Do me. Do me

until there is nothing left of me to do. Do me until there isn’t anyone to do it to.

Is that something you can do?

I want Cathy Brennan to fuck me while she screams transphobic slurs. I want Donald Trump to tell me he will make America great again as he pounds my ass – as he pays a Mexican trans sex worker to pound my ass, all the while averring that he is ‘the best at fucking, and I’ve got advice from some of the, some of the top fuckers out there and let me tell you, this is going to be one Hell of a fuck’, I want Hillary Clinton to fuck me in the ass and tell me why three strikes and mandatory minimum sentences were needed, I want David Cameron to fuck my ass like a dead pig’s head and say he cares. I want Governor Pat McRory to fuck me in a bathroom he tells me I have no right to be in.

I want to be fucked by an orc chick. I want to be fucked over the event horizon of a black hole. I want to be fucked by myself from the darkest timeline. I want to be fucked, on stage, by Diamanda Galas. I want to be fucked in the alleyway behind the cathedral where we smoked weed, for money. I want to be fucked in my flat for money. I want to be fucked in my flat for money by so many people I wind up evicted.

I want you to fuck the baby I can’t have into me, then fuck me so hard you abort it.

I want the trans man I saw try to mansplain a free pride to one of its organisers to fuck me. I want the handsy cis gay man who threw a drink over me on the terrace of Manchester G.A.Y. to fuck me. I want the four skinheads who groped my tits in the woods that day to fuck me. I want everyone who’s given me a bad review to fuck me.

I want the woman who raped me to fuck me. Because she has to. Because she is one of you. Because some of you know her. And you all know each other. And you are all going to fuck me.

I want you to understand that there is going to be a point during all this when my survival instinct is going to take over. A point where I am going to start screaming and pleading and demanding that you stop, a point when I will try and fight back, and I want you to promise me you will ignore that. Ignore that and plough on, despite what I might say to make you stop, in spite of my increasingly feeble attempts to fight you off, I do not want you to stop even after I slip into learned helplessness and simply let it happen. I want you to keep going and going and going until I am a fucked-apart dead thing and then I want you to grind my corpse to powder. I want the life fucked out of me.

 I want you all to fuck me.

(with apologies to Brad Neely for stealing the phrase ‘fucked-apart dead thing’)