The Anorexic Bodybuilder (a poem from a long time ago)

The ebook version of my collected poetryI got a fan email last month, from Japan, about a poem I once wrote. This — trust me —  doesn’t happen very often.

I wrote the poem for a nightclub flyer in Galway almost 20 years ago. I found a copy of the flyer in my parents’ attic, while I was assembling my collected poems in 2010, and included it in the book.

She came across probably the only copy in Japan, brought there by Robert, a friend of mine. I would guess that a few hundred people have read it, certainly less than a thousand. It occurred to me that if it meant so much to her, maybe it would mean something to some other strangers too. So I’ve decided to put it on my blog, below. (Poems are just birds that fly in your window; the writer doesn’t own them.)

If it means something to you, no problem; copy it, print it out, put it on a T-shirt, whatever.

For those who like to know the story behind any piece of writing; no, I won’t tell you the details. But yes, it turned out OK for some of the women I knew back then. Not so well for others.

-Julian, Berlin, June 2013

THE ANOREXIC BODY-BUILDER

If I'm very lucky, once a year

(Maybe twice, if I've been eating fish)

I am dazzled by a bright idea

And here's the one I got this year (I wish

It was a bit more bright, but it's bright-ish)

Anyway, yes, body-building, then.

It's an anorexia for men.

All the girls I know hate body-builders,

Find the mass of rippling flesh disgusting

Certainly not sexy. It bewilders

Boys to think their sister could be thrusting

Fingers down her throat like that... No lusting

After bulk for women then. And mannish

Boys have no desire at all to vanish.

To blow the self up, and to disappear:

Two expressions of a single urge

To shout the Will and make the body hear

The body-builder wills the flesh to surge

The anorexic wills an ebb, a purge

The Stalin of the mind lets the tanks roll:

The body is a place they can control

Each pursues a lunatic ideal

Each is lonely in the mad pursuit

When the vision of oneself's unreal

The vision of all others lacks a root

The muscle-man exploding through his suit

The wisp of girl who frowns at her reflection

They both recede from us toward Perfection.

This should end with some kind of conclusion.

Final statement. Answer to the riddle.

If I could, I'd give you the solution

Or at least some figures you could fiddle

But I can't, I'm stuck here in the middle

Seeing men expand and women shrink

I watch them go, and don't know what to think.

(From The Psychedelian, Issue 3 Volume 1, Thursday Oct. 21st, 1994. Collected in Free Sex Chocolate, Salmon Poetry, 2010.)

An old scratchy photo of Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

I've been so FLIPPING busy that my blog has been left unfed since October. (Also, I will admit, the crack cocaine of tweeting has weaned me off the long opium dream of blog posting.)

But my old friend Suzie Shorten just sent me this photo, so feck it, I'll slap it up for your amusement.

Major flashback... Galway, 1997... Town Hall Theatre bar. Left to right: Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, Suzie (who's at MCD now), future president of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, and me (with blond hair).

Some cowboys, in the Wild West, 1997: Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

By golly, a night out in Galway was a NIGHT OUT in those days. Malcolm had finished his talk, and was about to be taken away by the Arts Festival organisers, to the respectable and venerable festival club in the Warwick, in Salthill. They'd almost got him safely into the taxi when he escaped from his minders, trotted up to me and my beloved (we were sheltering for a last few minutes in the theatre doorway from the inevitable Galway rain) and, under the entirely mistaken impression that we knew where the cool clubs were, asked us where he should go. (I was a milk-drinking, hot-water-bottle-using homeboy who went out about once every three years, and my beloved was worse, but he wasn't to know that. It was the hair, man. Blondes DO have more fun.)

I had heard of an illegal wine bar, in a cellar under a solicitors on Abbeygate Street - passwords! secret knocks! - but I'd never tried to get in. It turned out that "er, yeah, that's Malcolm McLaren" was a secret password. And so Malcolm held court, enthroned in a very comfortable old leather armchair, in the Galway underworld, till pretty close to dawn. Stories, theories, stern lectures, good advice (which I never took), even better anecdotes, and his complicated, multiple, silly, brilliant future plans. (He was most excited by his Chinese, satirical/situationist, pop group, The Rice Girls... I don't think he ever did get a record company to fund that one...) A highly entertaining man. (Oh, if any tabloid journalists are reading this; the future president retired early - long before the illegal wine bar - don't worry.)

For a more detailed account of the night... er, email me.