Good Boy (a trans lyric)

At the dinner table, everyone is singing, you feel the rhythm, like stitches in the fabric of genetics and genre, the constraints of belonging, but nobody’s thinking about it that way because they’re singing, hands keeping time, hitting the table, passing a plate, a key change, but change is never really a possibility, only variation in the pattern. You’re sitting there, attempted facsimile of a metronome, loose matter, slinging itself toward sculpture and mold. A good boy. But unlike bronze or silver, cast into shape, the mold of your body grows, gets green at the edges. An attempt to cast yourself into the fabric of genetics and genre, a failure despite your desire to be tied up. Is it sexy? You mouth the words you don’t know, tongue the guttural backdrop of certain consonants. Once around the table singing, once around the table talking, once around the table eating, once around the table carving a groove into the habit of a world that makes your skin crawl. But you want it. Like being tied up, like being told what you want, because sometimes that’s what you want. 

Funny how you can tell that something is falling apart even as you aspire to its coherence. The familial home, a stage for devotion, a series of arrivals that continues in perpetuity. But the prospect or performance of belonging is both a choice and not a choice if your desire remains aimed at the person sitting across from you. If your desire remains in lockstep, locked into the idea that you want any of this. You shift in your seat, excuse yourself to pee, make the case that you just feel tired, a little antsy, you drank too much water. But the floor creaks under your footsteps, the creak correlated to the weight of your body as it moves, the pitch testimony to the task of trying to bear up under the weight of this rhythm. How many times can you remove yourself from the pattern to go take a piss? And even if you do, what are you pissing on? You know that they notice the difference in your ability to keep it all in. Your weight on the floor discloses your discomfort, keys everyone in to the suspicion that you don’t believe in coherence.