Artifacts and Illusions

Laurie Penny’s Saudade

There are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-heeled shoes to run and being told not so fast

The best minds of my generation consumed by craving, furious half naked starving-

Who ripped tights and dripping make up smoked alone in bedsits bare mattresses waiting for transfiguration.

Who ran half dressed out of department stores yelling that we didn’t want to be good and beautiful

Who glowing high and hopeful were the last to leave the gig our skin crackling with lust and sweat and pure music

Who wrote poetry on each other’s arms and cared more about fucking than being fuckable

Who worked until our backs stiffened and our limbs sang with the memory of misbehaviour that was what it was to be a woman

Who dared to dance until dawn and were drugged and raped by men in clean T-shirts and woke up scared and sore to be told it was our fault

Who swallowed bosses’ patronizing side-eyes stole away from violent broken boys in the middle of the night and vowed never again to try to fix the world one man at a time

Who slammed down the tray of drinks and tore off our aprons and aching smiles and went scowling out into the streets looking for change

Who stripped in dark rooms for strangers’ anodyne dollars because we wanted education and were told we were traitors

Who sat faces upturned to the glow of the network searching searching for strangers who would call us pretty

Who bared our breasts to hidden cameras and fought and fought and fought to be human

Who waited in grim hallways with synth-pop crackling over the speaker system for the doctor to call us clutching fistfuls of pamphlets calling us sluts whores murderers

Who crossed continents alone with knapsacks full of books bare limbs clear-eyed vision running running from the homes that held our mothers down

Who filled notebooks with gibberish philosophy and scraps of stories and cameras to prove we were there keeping our novels and the name of out children close to our hearts

Who were told all our lives that we were too loud too tisky too fat too ugly too scruffy too selfish too much too and refused to take up less space refused to be still refused refused refused to be tame

Who would never be still. Who would never shut up. Who were punished for it and spat and snarled and they shook the bars of our cages until they snapped and they called us wild and crazy and we laughed with mouths open hearts open hands open and would never not ever be tame.

Sara, I’m with you in hospital, in the narroe rooms where you have put off your veil to count your ribs through your T-shirt, short hair and secrets and quiet defiance crying together that we don’t know how to be perfect-

Lara, I’m with you in mandatory art therapy, where we draw pictures of weeping cocks and are told we are not making progress-

Lila, I’m with you in a north London bathdroom, watchhing unreal maggots crawl in the cuts in your arms and listening to your girlfriend drunk and raging through the wall-

Andy, I’m with you in Bethnal Green where you love ambitious angry women with heart brain pen fingers tongue and you have a line from Nietzche tattooed over your cunt-

Adele, I’m with you in the student occupation, with your lipstick and cloche hat and teenage lisp drawling that there’s not enough fucking in this revolution and we must take action-

Kay, I’m with you on the night bus, half drunk and high dragging bright-eyed boys home to our bed, where we watch them worn out sleeping and whisper that we will never be married-

Katie, I’m with you in Zuccotti Park, where a broken heart is less important than a broken laptop is less important than a broken future and we watch the cops beating kids bloody on the pavement for daring to ask for more-

Tara, I’m with you in Islington where you have thrown all your pretty dresses out of the window and flushed your medication so you can write and write-

Alex, I’m with you and a bottle of Scotch at two in the morning when you tell me that no man will make us live for ever and we must seduce the city the country the world-

We are always hungry.

There are more of us than you think.