Chaos to Couture

Hello, are you there?

I'm waiting, standing

in the middle of a room

surrounded by mannequins

with orange hair wearing slashed cotton

reattached with safety pins,

and Patti Smith's Horses is playing

and the lights have dimmed

to reveal, written in washable marker 

on the esteemed walls - 

the kind of marker you were allowed

to use as a kid just in case you wrote

on yourself, on the floor, on your bed -

a specter of a revolution, it read,

"Punk is about revolting," 

and I ditched a pink stilleto,

"revolting against a society"

and I stretched my toes,

"against a society that doesn't"

and the security guard eyed me, 

"a society that doesn't think you deserve,"

and told me to put my shoes back on
"doesn't think you deserve a revolution,"
and I walked into a long hallway where

placed on pedestals were row upon row

of the now quintessential little black dresses

claiming to be the beginning of retro,

and I stretched onto the balls of my feet

and extended myself through the space

until under duress,

I sat in the silence and

placed one shoe back on, and then another,

and bathed in the fading glow

of a an era that had once decreed its independence,
but was now being declared useless

and ending its revolt.

May we?

Can we choose,

are we allowed

to walk this way,

talk this way,

dress this way –

are we, by necessity,

women

born into bodies

partially prized since birth

for the possibility

of the continuation

of the cyclical rhythm of female time,

the body as vessel that produces

the next generation

of women,

who produce the next

generation of women

who finally dare to ask,

Are we allowed to dress as a man?

Are we allowed to be feminine?

Are we allowed to love other women?

Are we allowed to love many men?

Are we allowed to become men,

(and what does being a man even mean?)

to physically alter the body that promises the future

because we feel our spirits chose

wrong this time around?

May we? Can we? 

Are we women?

(and what does being a woman even mean?)

May we take our bodies out of

the collective investment

in the future, symbolized

by the Child, who in turn

has been stripped of individuality

by those factions who would rather

paint the theory of innocence onto a canvas

as the women grasp the children

produced of their own blood

and desperately query,

“May we?"

I am a walking contradiction,

retracing my steps,

looking backward to find my way forward,

deconstructing the paradigm,

to conversely find my niche within

the cultural construction of Woman

to become the body as vessel,

but I also will never stop

reaching across boundaries

to find the gray area

where we have always dwelt,

the middle ground between being a Woman

and becoming a woman, the in-between space

where individuality begins to surface,

and the, “May I?” becomes

“I can. I will. I am.”

I danced

I leaned away

and in the blink of an eye

I stepped off the edge

and tottered into a new idea.

I tipped into the thought

of choosing differently

and it was anything but easy

to walk directly away.

I’ve found, lately, that

even weaving through

the fake sidewalk that moves daily,

barriers erected

where previously there weren’t any,

even the fog horns

that startle me endlessly

and conversely promise safety,

even the cockroaches that leak out

of the second avenue construction

and barely last a hairsbreadth

before succumbing to a shoe,

even the underbelly details

bring me comfort

because I stepped away.

Sometimes I weave backward -

I hover on the surface of what once was

and play the game of what could have been.

But in the end I always find

that singing to a dog in a kitchen,

slashing paragraphs for the maybe of a future,

and sitting on a futon that plays at being comfortable

helps me straddle the middle of what was and what will be

because I chose to dance.