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BOYS DON'T CRY
BOYS BOYS BOY YS BOYS BOYS BOYS BOYS BOYS DON'T DON'T DON N'T DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T RYCRYCRY CRYCRYCRYCRYCRYCR
Somewhere between the forgotten blue eyes and our history I inherited something I never wanted A hand me down predisposition of how I should be She and I this predisposition parted ways at 19 she left but lingers in baby pictures My gaze meeting hers in family rooms There she and I are enshrined some stranger attempt to remember what I forcefully try daily to forget She is nothing now except a name on a birth certificate , a communion dress and the name said in those same family rooms where she hangs and I hang on the walls Together but separated some how by Time Gender And Future The time it feels is always hers Time spent at least Gender is a wilting flower for her, for me it is always growing Future is reserved only for me she cannot join me there is only space for one name on the passport, on the college transcripts, on birthday cards, written with love on letters I and everyone who knew her must forget her I imagine conversations with her She asks where her painted nails are, the dolls she liked in secret, why tomboy didn't fit so well as we got older Where will her kids be She's confused at my choice for HRT No blonde bombshell babies No flowing wedding dress And I want to apologies to the young girl hanging in the frames on those walls My younger self I didn't know being myself would mean losing parts of you I will still paint my nails sometimes and I will hope that if I have daughters they look somewhat like you
We stand in rows today revolutionaries staring defiantly into the voyeuristic eye of history This nation is determined to shackle our bodies My body is new in the eyes of the law Recognition of who I am as a man is in its infancy This country wasn't built for me It wasn't built for us It was built in the back of churches I sat there too with the women of Ireland on cold wooden pews where they told exactly what we could and couldn't do there was no choice Where is our choice The children of generations who were so tied down they stopped noticing the ropes My body is not what's on my birth certificate Just a piece of paper to confine me to procedure, to practice if it all went wrong Just a constitution of who I am so they could make a choice for me Somehow abandoning motherhood meant giving up my Irish identity I didn't know my heart could shatter repeatedly until I heard about the babies lost in Tuam and this is what Irish society demands we do repress, repent, regret Repeal, repeal, repeal I am no more woman today than I was when I learned about the trips made alone over sea, And I worry what they would do with me What they would do with my body, capable of getting pregnant But Not of being a mother I was always someones son, though they thought I was their daughter But I shake inside knowing my choice was made by people who would spit the name I don't use and pronouns like the jagged edges of smashed stained glass We are building a new society in the vacant lots of the old Undoing the chains My body will never fit their mould I would rather they broke my bones Than wait any longer to have my right, your right, our right to choose My body is not an incubator to condemn me to some echo of femininity If it was me I would want the chance Like anyone else who is trans If I was forced to drag a weight I could not carry I wouldn't want to drag this nation to England with me I would want to be home Repeal the 8th amendment
Ireland is an empty house We will not stop till it feels like homeÂ
I have mountains on my back Heavy, snow-covered hills, Empty, desolate, no one tries to climb them They were put there by my parents They were put there by those who stare when I go into the bathroom, they were put there by your friends, by my friends by people who used to be my friends By people whose view of me is seen only through a key hole Who's picture of my body is based on secondary school biology Who's mindset is an intertwined set of locks Sex gender, identity All opened with the same key Trans has no closed doors, no locks no keys My body is a revolution Not a war Not an inevitable act of violence Not a hashtag I am not my mothers burden I am not my fathers disappointment And it echoes in me when he asks how I could possibly know what it felt like to be a man so alien to him I'll fill my lungs with enough air to create a hurricane around him when I tell him that man is no more a box than a coffin is I wasn't built for coffins And I wasn't built for you I was built like a house without the confines of walls It's cold sometimes But at least i have somewhere to go We'll always have somewhere to go I remember that when I worry about the rain I remember that when a become a conversation topic I remember that when I become a debate I remember that when they spit she and her at me like bullets And when did I become a patron of difference Because I don't fit in an ice cube size definition
And I'm a pacifist until I become a subject of conversion, an equation, solve it so you can fix me But if I'm unwell then I hope I don't get better I hope I don't reduce myself back to when I felt like I was constantly wearing wet clothes Something always weighting down on me I hope I never find myself there again comforting the shadows of myself who still longed for their approval, I know now it may never come The address left off letters, lost in the post I understand that I love them most While they tolerate me And to those who were taken from us I would not put flowers in your grave but I would build you gardens, orchards, plant forests in your memory. For those who saw so little in who they are they they decided to make it who they were, I would cloth you in oversized jackets with the pockets filled with love notes you do not need those who let you go. And after that when gender becomes a boarder that I cant cross over, my passport years out of date I think I'll have to stay sat outside in long grass surrounded by boxes I could never fit in waiting patiently for the revolution to begin.
I cry when I see the baby pictures She is so far back in my mind that the echoes of tears sounds more like raindrops than the water of her fear hitting the floor And when I said goodbye to her they chose her over me If they had to bury me what would the gravestone say If the nurse rang from a&e my mothers sleepy voice answering the trauma of my lost body with I only have one son and he is asleep in bed I've spend the last 21 years living life with one foot permanently stood inside my head There I am no ones car crash They'd place me in a pink coffin if they could But they won't see the end give it a few months and they'll never see me again I will only see them mirrored in other people's bigotry when I'm dragged by the collar from the men's room by a man who resembles my father And the woman in another city who will remind me of my mother tolerant of my choices but already disappointed before I speak Not the little girl she raised because she didn't raise me I grew from within the dirt they buried me Yet I cry because maybe my own daughter will have my sisters eyes and their gaze will burn like the past And maybe I will meet my brother in 20 years in a supermarket both reaching for frozen food he is so unaware and he will search my face for something familiar but I am gone I left his sister with him when I left And he never knew his brotherÂ
I sit alone outside before anyone comes home I smoke and I think of the body The canopy of confines that purely was design to challenge my ability to resist the itch To see if I could stop myself from clawing at the pale skin that so carefully packaged me for humanity You are a woman and in their eyes it is all you will ever be And yet time passes like a slow healing burn With the thought of my school pinafore Wondering how I always felt colder more exposed than the other boys who were never forced into these kinds of clothes Never a question of who they would grow up to be I never thought I would see myself past seventeen I still now sit thinking what worse could possibly happen jealous of the other boys when they gained their Adam's apple the absence in my throat replaced only by constant fears of tears But Boys don't cry Boys don't cry Boys don't cry