Rolling down school playing field, Summer 89

Me and boy mate land at the bottom, our bodies upside down

Our hair in each other’s mouths

Feeling giddy but upside down felt correct way up

 

‘I am Lee-Man, I have the power!’

In my bedroom playing with my He-Man

Dad playing Diana Ross downstairs

Boy with sword but also with wand

 

How many lines can you fit into a bedroom

in a two up two down terrace?

Wallpaper, curtains, lampshade, duvet cover and pillows

All with racing cars in rows and lines in order

Cutting hair off my head

Gluing hair onto He-Man

I like what I  see on the back page of that week’s Look In

Upside down, George Michael ,you turn me, inside out and round and round

Song lyrics printed over dark hairy chest

Lyrics become lines become words become hair

Hair loops and wraps around and through the holes of printed letters

through the ‘o’, through the ‘p’, through the ‘d’, through the ‘e‘

Dissolve, I transgress lines of straight male masculinity

My lines are those of en-queer-ry 


With every application of Mum’s black mascara

to He-Man’s freshly glued on eyelashes

I dis-order the lines I was born into

Dad and his brothers

Fags and footie

Beers and birds

Turn those lines on their head, upside down and inside out

 

Over washing lines, up high past the conservatory blinds

At my bedroom desk, I’m learning to draw men in cartoon lines

Flat lines over where should be trouser crotch mountain

Lines of dick-less dolls in Debenhams redundant in end-of-sale lines

Standing in rows and lines watching Disneyland parade

‘Are you a fairy?’, girl asks

I didn’t know back then that ‘fairy’ meant ‘gay’

Had she seen me looking at the stitching lines

tracing the steep trouser crotch contours of the aptly named Prince Eric

Mount Everest in his trousers

Voice in my head,  ‘I can see your Eric Sean, erection, Eric Sean, erection’

 

Cute little front hair quiff  

overtook my attention as he spoke so conceptually during art school crits

about his latest latex tubes hung like limp Eric Seans

Upside down, George Taylor you turn me, inside out and round and round

Thought at the time attending art school was about the art scene

Getting in

Until I realised it was all about me coming out

Both Georges Taylor and Michael all over teenage scrapbook in 96

Hair stories and charcoal drawings in amongst the fishing huts in Hastings

Looking over at George with his new girlfriend whilst I listen to Older on CD

 

Lost touch with George

Crossed wires or broken telephone lines

The closest I next come to feeling upside down was

Berlin 99

Georg Baselitz’s painted nudes

Well hung men hung well on gallery walls

when right way up meant upside down

Dissolve, these paintings transgress art historical pictorial composition

I leave Baselitz to go to the nightclub

Turn my body upside down with hairy homo cubs and bears

 

I stand before Baselitz again, in Vienna, this year

I am now much older than George Michael when he released Older in ‘96

Does that now make me elderly or just wiser?

Like Baselitz’s bodies, I do know that one day I will also

Dissolve, with only a single strand of my hair turned grey remaining

in a world where upside down is turned wrong way up  

by the ignorant but dominant few