Pearled Daydreams Of What Happens After Violence Has No Impact

Never mention how-

Trapped in a bus compressing Roman skeletons into earth’s digesting magma,

Muscular…

Lost mental cavities inside a bleached chamber of objectivity,

No Piers Morgan slogans cushion

rows on rows of pixelated fabric.

Fleshy-

A bus is just a bus.

Genomed, (meaning here a reference to the forceable distortion of my body always

infecting the taste of others with stiff, incomplete movements).

Just a travelling, metallic dog

Coded.

Hands hover over a cracked phone screen…

II

[...] As I press my cheekbone into the bone-marrowed window, I think I hear glass arteries

destroy the atomic-blessed peacekeeping zone separating my nerves from touching Marsimported

rain I reach to virginise my skin with,

My skin numbs to condensation that feels like golden plaques on coffins

If my cheek becomes imprinted

With the finalised temperature of another,

Can I keep holding onto a symbolic ghoul

Only I in this mundane space know about.

II.5

See the amorphous figure two rows behind,

Tapping their teeth on

Seat holders substituted for my neck.

Oh baby plastic I would cradle your existence if it weren’t for my mimetic cells being so horrified at alkaline flesh,

Yk I want to make love to all life forms before I go blind into that brutal night,

Before I end up spat on like you.

II.Cont.

A mortician’s breath clusters around Brandon Teena’s mushroomed teeth,

Nebraskan trees flick off silver dust in springtime

-Plastering.

Carrying microscopic testosterone residue.

Historical analysis dates the leakage back to the last first kiss of 1993,

(Does the body detransition in death?!?)

(Does the cash-controlled migration of facial fat revert after the ghoul swallows on its own botox,)

Does It gorge on thighs with shark-scaled cuts.

And I’m sitting on the bus trying to learn how to extend my love,

Over ashened Edenic mountains with lobster pincher peaks,

Over the teens laughing at my over-thickened eyebrows,

Playfully enunciating the sentimentality pre-destined within consonant vowels.

Nebraska. Nebraska. Nebraska.

I need someone to teach me how to avoid metempsychosis if I die a trans death,

Tell me, please, how to inhabit the 1994 body before someone’s curiosity invades me, No invaded you. sorry Brandon-

They wrote a song about you,

Do you want to hear?, I offer my waxed headphone.

Petshop Boys remembered how they probably knew a Brandon called Ellis who disappeared after newwave took over from punk.

I don’t think they had any right to call you a girl the way I can notice what you were.

III

In a half-finished essay, short story and poem, I talk about how transness revolutionises selfexpression as an act of artefact making.

Aesthetic reformulation is our way to transgress the repulsion read backwards on our tongued bodies,

First by implicating a shared disgust.

If violence often stems from an erotic fixation on attraction overlapping genitalia,

Amyl nitrate washes over golden cum,

+ unconventional foundations,

Then I need an Opaquely shimmering veil to coat my Pronounced Curvature with untransmutable beauty.

Peacocked velvet headbands, tilted to the side, hand-made, matching with unwashed charity jeans,

I must make my physicality more desirable than the mitotic defective norm I could be,

Perhaps performances really can disturb porous

tissues of caterpillic self-loathing.

IV

And I’m sitting on the bus thinking of what better way to recount events by saying

I, Tranny,

Them afraid,

Spotted the fabrics,

Spotted the face,

The chest,

Everything and nothing about me

Fell away to reveal my true emptiness,

An emptiness for you to spit at,

No one turned around.

An emptiness for you to laugh at,

No one turned around.

An emptiness for you to show your knife at,

I get off the bus.

V

I want to go home protected to say what I think at my partner’s birthday dinners, because

I want to know unconditional love from an adult who sees and loves me for being trans,

I want to be consumed

and all

I want is to stand over a pub table and pull the skin that grabbed my hair in the toilet.

I want to tie maiddress cissies to my cane.

I want to ignore the black-crystallised tar sticking to my thoughts saying that to live recognised

as trans means to surrender access to domestic harmony.

I want to shout,

and panic,

and spit

on the same person

again

and

again,

because I can never express their mistakes.

Return to I

And I’m sitting on the bus,

Aged 17,

Letting its’ wheels contour my mediterranean lip hairs as I jolt

Up and down.

Unaware of growing attachments to a disappearing space

Manipulated as a public twilight zone,

Trannifying moist seats with smuggled clothes to change into.

Unknowing I’ll sit on the bus one day

Aged 20,

Still trans,

Crying over how worms are able to pulse into the dead’s sewn on balls, maybe now collapsed together into one egregious hole,

I text someone saying how Lou Sullivan spent his last day popping wheelies in supermarket aisles,

And I think about how the line I skipped ahead to read:

‘There’s a lot more I should be writing but I’ll sign off here for now’

Is not some metaphoric plea of wanting to live,

He felt

Sick of dying,

As

I too,

Write this off a bus,

Haunted by pearled daydreams and inverse situations.

Francis Keaton is a disembodied, grotesque and obsessive writer previously published for non-fiction in Minor Literature[s]. Atm he is writing fiction and theatre scripts about fandom culture, trans + Cypriot histories, and angels. His socials are ig @francis.keaton, x @venus_as_a_boy3