Unbend you straight

Text of audio:

She places her hands on me

Without asking and pulls at this bent body,

These legs the site of her expertise.

She has studied my affliction well

She knows these bodies

And how to fix me.

‘’Be strong’’ she says,

‘’You are a brave child,

Show me how brave you can be’’.

Breath held.

Teeth clenched.

She begins her work on me.

I am not this body, she cannot find me.

--------------

She lays beside me

Fingers tracing my bends and curves

‘’I love the way you move, your difference, uniqueness, you intrigue me’’

White teeth showing in the candle light

I fall

‘’it’s ok’’ she says

‘’relax, you’re beautiful’’

--------------

‘’You don’t cry like the others’’

She says,

‘’Good girl,

We’ll make you normal,

Make you walk’’.

Her accent, this 5yr old cannot place, is thick, this pain thicker.

I breathe.

She teaches me how to draw

A thin cord away from my body

Holding it like a balloon,

Like a kite out the window

Where my eyes find the sky.

The pain distant now, I float above

Above how it feels

How it feels to really be inside myself

Far from these muscles which fight her unbending.

I am somewhere else.

Uncurl me,

This self so full of wrong and shame.

She finds me each day

And calls me in.

We began again

To try to straighten what belongs bent.

Control and tame this body,

Shame its movements.

There is hope in the fixing

Hope for acceptance,

For a ‘normal life’. 

I will grow into someone else.

A straight unbent woman on her wedding day,

Beautiful,

Normal,

Walking,

Wanted.

--------------

She finds me this night

Unfurls me,

Desire filled fingers

Discover my strings,

Drawing me in.

She asks

‘’Is this is ok,
And this?

And this?’’

Waits…

Waits for eyes to say yes as well as mouth

Then she follows my winding tracks

Where no lover has walked before,

To hidden places,

Shame filled by another woman.

She brings them out slowly,

These tangled cords of self,

Turning them in the glow of soft light,

Small sounds,

 Breath.

‘’Breathe ‘’

She says,

‘’It’s ok’’.

Unraveled me

With your acceptance,

Watch me curl around you.

I think myself in love.

This space.

This body.

This night.

She finds the places that were never straightened

Too bent their natural state

Kisses them.

I am afraid they will hurt her, so strong the pain that hinds there.

She knows not what magic she is working,

With her slow and gentle hands

Her glowing body

Drawing out my light,

Calling it love.

This one my healer.

I can let go.

Be just as I am

Growing, un-normal, bent.

''Do you have sex in your wheelchair?''

This is a story/poem that addresses the question that I get asked a lot particularly by drunk people ‘do you have sex in my wheelchair?’ It’s a bit raunchy as it answers that question so if you’re not feeling up for taking the plunge and finding out or you’re under 18 then don’t have a listen. Its also now published at fuckabilityjax on dodsonandross.com 

It’s also about saying goodbye to my old wheelchair and welcoming in the new one which I received on Thursday.   

Text of audio:

This one looks just like my old one.

In 5years the manufacturers can offer me

nothing new, no new inventions,

just a $3000 price increase. So I look for the things

that make her different-yes,  she is a her,

who may become a him,

or float in-between in a gender-bending land.

I am levitating off the ground.

I move this way.

I feel the speed of a hill and its slow climb,

the vibration of every bump, the lean of a gutter.

Smooth new rims under my fingertips.

She is so new, I am the first to touch her,

to know this feeling. Only another who lives

within their chair can know the joy

of feeling an unmarked wheel rim.

Sensitive fingertips come to know its dents, its scratches,

they tell of our times together. Like the time

me and my best friend were too busy laughing

so hard while crossing the road that she pushed me

into the curb and scratched you  all along your side;

marking you with our laughter.

Or the hot summers spent sweating on you,

body sticky and muscles sore from wheeling up hills.

Or your front wheel that would stick in the wet and make me wheel into door frames,

leaving people wondering why I’d suddenly

lost control of myself; that day not so long ago

when you chose your moment spectacularly to pull this trick,

I was wheeling out of the psychiatrist’s office

and he just stood and looked at me

as I worked with all my left arm muscles to

skim clear of his door and he no doubt wondered

what else was wrong with me.

I remember the lovers I have had in the last 5 years…

The sex I have almost had on you, only to decide

it was too awkward and be pulled away and onto the floor,

a bed, a lover’s body. My naked body finds you

afterwards for trips into the bathroom and shower.

You become part of the afterglow of our fucking

as parts of me and my lovers leak onto you,

even as I try and keep you clean,

to keep you out of it.

Sex must not come with me as I wheel down the street

to my parent’s house, as I sit for dinner. I could cover you

with towels as I make my way from bed to shower

but there isn’t time, the naked laughing woman

propels me forward and just I don’t care.

I make you sound so dirty, so beautifully fucking dirty.

And you are. It’s not that I don’t wash your covers

becoming self-conscious of the parts of me

that have leaked onto and into you.

It’s that we are linked you and I.

We spend each day, each and every day, touching.

You are mine. My space. My personal space.

There are few who are close enough to me

to be able to sit in you and have me watch

without feeling invaded.

I think of a lover, still fresh enough to sting,

who was the first to include you in our kissing,

in our cuddling, in our hot lead-up to sex.

Times spent getting about the house with her on my lap,

facing me wheeling us with her hands.

No one before had thought this sexy, fun.

It was something that she just did with

laughter and passion leaving me feeling such a rush of

 love and intimacy with you, with her,

with myself and this embodiment.

There was a time when wheelchair + me = terror.

Remnants of a childhood spend with the message

drilled into my body daily that ‘walking’ was the

Holy Grail and to end up in a wheelchair

 was worse than death.  You will have no friends,

no one will love you, you will never have a boyfriend

words spoken by family-still lingers within me.

It’s time. It’s time to practice radical politics

to inhabit who and how I am in the world fully

and you, my shinny, glide-y exoskeleton are part of my life,

part of how I move, how I experience space

 and a big part of how I am seen in the world.

I belong to a species of wheelchair Krips, queers, radicals

Body revolutionaries!

The End

A big shout out to the Sins Invalid crew-check them out-you inspire me to keep being the radical  Body revolutionary that I am. Much love. See ya.

This video and the work of Sins can also be found at my youtuble channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/f3ckability/