the nights

The people who try chat you up

On a night out

Don’t give a fuck about you.

Just like the backstreet boys

They don’t care who you are,

Where you’re from, what you do

As long as you love them.

And by love I mean:

Ride.

They’re durty monkeys

Just hoping to hop up on your

Big red arse and 

Scream and sweat til there’s no energy left.

And that sounds like fun for short time

And that’s all it will be

Five minutes if you’re lucky.

They just want to fuck you.

They want to get 

in and out

Of you 

as quickly as possible

And then get you out.  

And the minute they’re done 

Or right after round two

They’ll want to forget aall about you.

They don’t want to see you 

As a whole person or maybe at all

You’re just a hole for them

To pump and dump into

Forget your orgasm they don’t care 

Most wont even go down on you.

So excuse me if I tell you to get the boat pal 

I’d rather go home alone and fuck meself. 

I’ve got a friend waiting for me whose better buzz than you anyway. 

Slut

He slapped me across

The face once,

And then again, straight away.

Pulled me up by the scruff

Of me collar.

Squared up and got

Straight up in my face

Forehead to forehead.

‘You’re a dirty little slut’

He spat through his teeth

at me.

And then he kissed me

And I liked it.

And I wrote it down

Unashamed.

Men who write

He once said that

Men who write poetry aren’t manly.

He lived by an arbitrary ideal

Of tall men, strong men, silent men.

All the flowers and fauna and feelings

Are for girls.

Yet disappointment

At the unachievable

Plagued him.

…

As if the canon has not been defined by men.

…

By Shakespeare and Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Byron,

Blake, Shelly, and Keats.

By Joyce and Yeats,

And Kavanagh and Heaney.

And Whitman

And Eliot

And Pound.

…

Poetry is a woman’s game for sure

And his toxic masculinity

And fear of poetry

Has nothing to do

With his inability to verbalise

The disappointment he felt

Having never reached the ideals imposed

On his gender.

Don’t dance, don’t speak out, don’t feel small.

Society regulates us all.

Expectations of gender in teenagers

While all the young boys

Talked about fiddling with themselves,

Normalising it.

We could be branded as a durty slut

If we openly admitted to it.

Or made feel totally ashamed

You never even tried

To do it yourself.

We were told to

Keep our legs closed

Or boys wouldn’t respect us.

That’s probably why we

We have so little for them now.

It was all about the boys really.

We were to police them

To tell them no as if we didn’t want it too

To tell them where our eyes were

And tell them when to use a johnny

Because they wouldn’t if we didn’t.

We are told what to wear

So men won’t leer at us

And if we don’t adhere to the strict dress code

We were asking for it.

We can’t wear thongs under our clothes

Because it would give them the wrong idea

Even before they see it.

We were given rules

Don’t be a slut

But you need sexual experience.

Don’t be a prude,

Or dress like an aul wan.

We are intended to be both

Virginal and sexual

And put clothes and makeup

For the attention of men.

We are to always be on alert to ward men off.

This is the self-serving duplicity

Of the patriarchy.

….

An ‘aul wan’ is an older woman, a sometimes derogatory term from Dublin.

Self-respect.

My self respect

Is not around my ankles,

I’ve kicked it off.

With me knickers.

How fucking dare you equate

The number of people I’ve rode

With the level dignity I demand?

And what is the acceptable number

I should confine myself to

To make you happy?

How is it right that I could fuck one person twenty times

But to fuck twenty people all at once would be a disgrace?

Saying important shit

I’m too coarse to be a poet.

Like Polaris keratosis

On me arms in summer

And my skin just outta the shower.

I want to easily articulate the

Innate truths and fundamental

Universalities of the human

Psyche.

But my tongue is too heavy

And my accent’s spattered with cunts and fucks.

How am I gonna escape the escape, the system of inequality

That relegates working class women’s opinions,

That regulates what we say and how we say it.

What if I don’t talk like a nice lady?

Paint me like onea your Clontarf girls.

Is it so cliche

To want flowers to bloom

From my empty mouth?

Stick fingers down my throat

And try to fish the rainbow out

Make that almost vomit noise.

I ache under the weight of

My contemporaries words.

I eat, sleep, and breath cliche.

My pre-used and once loved words

could never expose the inner workings of the working class experience.