various male relationships

i overheard a brother 
from the proclaimers
smoking on the step 
discussing the anal invader.
modern men coagulate 
into half-brother run clans
garries nu and old 
face-off ying and yang
they hope their hauners 
will do the honours
alpha of the man gang

i had been at the studio practicing with my band when i stepped outside for whatever reason and the one of the brothers from the proclaimers was there and i just overhead him say, ‘they call him the anal invader apparently.’

then i think i saw a photo of a run club on instagram and all the guys looked the same. like half siblings maybe. and my friend i.h. told me he was going to get a yin-yang tattoo of the gary numan and gary oldman. he still hasn’t got it yet as far as i know.

on the verge of an irretrievable memory, a texture, a vague sense

tangled shoe, cockapoo, over you, road rash tattoo
honestly what are the odds?

i was running down the canal towpath when a cockatoo got all under me, then i got all over it. i was mostly fine except for some road rash to my forearm, where i had a fresh, unhealed tattoo. which reminds me, i really should get that retouched…

memory is a funny thing. i’m always forgetting what i’m in the middle of, trying to do many things at once… you know when you are talking about someone and lose their name, or forget the word for the specific thing that is due to appear in your story… this happens a lot to me.

i remember once losing the yoga word for many hours. i was at a yoga class and the teacher ended the session by inviting us to make an ‘appropriate gesture’ and i wanted to say namaste but it was gone and everyone else in the class was i think being overly culturally sensitive by not saying it.

thankfully it came back to me in ikea later that day. (more ikea later this month, meatball fans!)

this isn’t a cover up, the red rose, the guerilla’s fist

trigger warning: self harm

well it was a cover up really. i had a bit of a mental health crisis when i was younger, in my late teens. one result of that was self harm scars on my arms. i know realise i was going through a period of autistic burnout on the transition from high school to the new expectations of early adulthood. an experience a lot of austic people go through.

i don’t know why it took me so long to realise i could tattoo over the scars. maybe i just wasn’t ready to move on. but then suddenly i needed to. to make them a polished part of my story. i love my arms now. until very recently, i guess i preferred just not to think about them. and the message they sent out about me, and my mental health.

i cut a lana del rey tattoo into my arm, is that self harm?

it’s actually only sort of a lana del rey tattoo. i got the idea when the queen died, and there was a new king. there was stuff in the news about the king’s new cipher, c iii r, which replaced the queen’s e ii r (charles the third rex, lizzy the second regina.)

i thought, what would the american cypher be? so instead of the british crown it would be the one from the statue of liberty. and the monograph… l d r, for lana del rey, or, alternatively lana the 500th regina.

oh and also. i love lana del rey.

i turn my snout at regret—the danger made it meaningful / while my teenaged self-destruction echoes on (and on)

TRIGGER WARNING…. self harm.

as an undiagnosed autistic teenager, you may not be surprised to learn i had a troubled time. social skills did not come naturally. i learn by making mistakes. to learn this way – you have to make the mistakes. i have a bad habit of breaking new things. delicate things that don’t belong to me.

i took the pain out on myself. i directed my meltdowns internally. i cut my arms to shreds. i abused substances.

last year i started getting all my self-harm scars covered with tattoos. and now, when i look at my arms, i no longer feel shame. i love my arms. nobody has arms like mine. they are perfect. they tell my story.

are tattoos important to you?