Tonight's Poet Corner: To The Tightrope Walkers

NOTE: This poem was actually written on March 31st, 2016. I decided to hold off on posting it until I had performed it in front of the high school English class I am co-teaching, as part of a unit they were doing that involved performance poetry. Enjoy.

To The Tightrope Walkers

by Belinda Roddie

I am faithful to a personal balance. I am devoted
to an equilibrium. A tightrope has been tied
between two rough lips of a gorge, and placing
one foot after the other, I straddle the tense bridge
that connects me to the other side, and once I reach it,
I carefully turn around and go back the way
I came, and so it goes, forever. I am not

an acrobat by any stretch of the imagination, but I still
expect myself to keep steady so I don’t fall
into the deep ravine below, where one current
takes me one way, and another takes me the opposite
direction. Angry rapids and jagged rocks eagerly wait

for me to succumb to a seemingly inevitable plunge.
An F and an M

are carved into the stony banks. I have been
stamped with one of these letters already. It is on
my driver's license, my passport, my medical records. It
is scratched into my chromosomes and buried
reluctantly in my DNA like a broken double helix.
I bear the official seal on my chest, covered by a thick,
skin-colored canvas that makes a part of my anatomy
that I hate a little flatter, a little smaller,
a little less noticeable. But I

have been branded, I have been tattooed, and the ink
is the symbol of my biological sex: Capital F
for Female, capital P
for Princess, capital S
for Sweetheart, L
for Little Lady, M
for Ma’am or Miss or Miz or Missus, H
for Honey and B
for Babe, and finally, N
for Nice Piece of Ass. I have been reduced
to binary code, where they want me to sport
more zeroes than ones, but I am much more
complex data than that. I am walking on
a tightrope, and while I wobble on the strained twine,

in real life, outside my cerebral contortions, I head

to the bar for a drink with a buddy of mine. We wear

leather jackets and belts. We watch baseball with
shining amber in our glasses, and when my friend
laughs, I can see the thin light catch the edge
of his stubble, the hair of his chinny chin chin
glinting dry gold and orange. This is not

one of those days when I am Dapper Dan,
debonair and strapping, the tails and buttons
embroidering my swagger and gentlemanly
gait. Sometimes, I am Fred Astaire or Frank Sinatra
in a three-piece suit, argyle socks tucked
into flat heeled shoes, a pre-tied butterfly settling
against my jugular, and all I need is the top hat

and the walking stick accompanying my firm handshake
and my “How do you do?" And I know that all this,

this wardrobe crammed with masculine accessories
and niceties - they’re not just for men anymore,
but I am caught between the storm
and the earthquake. I am water and earth
and air and fire. I can be feminine
as fuck, or your Macho Man, or both, or neither,
in the same night, in the same hour, in the same
goddamn minute. But for now, it’s time for booze
and bros and boys on 'roids sending leather spinning
ninety miles per hour into a hungry mitt – this sort
of game helps me unwind. And then behind me, a voice:

“Excuse me, sirs,” and when
my friend and I both turn around, the look
on the speaker’s face is like wax melting
from a wick. He is disintegrating in front
of me in reds and pinks. He is metalwork
dismantling like his hinges don’t hold him up
anymore. “I am so sorry,” he says, blurts, howls,
thinking he’s making things right. “I am so sorry.
I didn’t mean to call you that.” But I smile, and
I shake out my shoulders and puff out my bound
chest as best as I can, and I say, “No, it’s okay. 

You got it right the first time.” And that molten face
reconfigures into sharp skepticism. Let me tell you
what that looks like: Doom.

“Excuse me?” he asks me.
“I said you got it right the first time. You

can call me sir. That’s okay.” And I try to ignore
the lumpy smile on his face, a smile with enough
cracks to show me the truth behind the false détente,
and with a laugh that feels like my own pint glass
splintering in my fist, he says, wait, declares,
wait, announces to an invisible audience, to society,
to the world order: “No.”

As if it’s his choice. As if even though
I have walked down the street in drag, with spirit
gum staining my lips beneath an artificial beard – as if
even though the only time I put on make-up is when
I want my eyebrows to be a little darker, is when

I want my jaw to seem more pronounced – as if
even though I may look like just a tomboy or just
a dyke, plain and simple, all aboard the stereotype
train, leaving the station now – he gets to decide
where I fit in the binary and not me. I am not just non-
binary; I am anti-binary. I rebel against
the black and white. I do not just take one railway in
my life's journey. I am the androgynous specter
that makes anyone hoping to stay within their own
mapped out borders squirm at the sight of me traversing
their personal boundaries like some sort of paranormal
nightmare. As if they can decide who I am
and who I am meant to be. Others I

talk to, thank God, don’t react so fiercely. They
do not burn my banner down so quickly, but when
I tell them, “Hi, nice to meet you. They/them
pronouns, please,” when I let them see
the surge of the tide behind my eyes and beneath
my bones and the muscles that tighten when I get
their hand in my grip and let slip that I am genderfluid,
well, it’s no secret that the responses I get can be cold.
They can be mellow. They can be disappointed,
disapproving, disenchanted, or simply disinterested.
They can be confused, like I took a spoon to
their organized brain and scrambled up
the gray matter like oatmeal, blending the words
and expectations that had once been so comfortably
categorized. And what they say can range from
the seemingly naïve “I’m just not used to using
‘they’ as a singular pronoun,” to the bombastically
accusatory anthem of, “You’re just like this because
society made you ashamed to be a woman!” And when
that happens, my personal clock spins backwards.
Its hands flail

in the direction of the stubborn past, when I’m eleven
years old, and my mother sits my little pixie cut down
on the couch and tells me that I have to let my hair
grow out, and I have to switch out my flannel for
a v-neck top and my carpenter jeans for girl shorts,
and when I ask her why, she says, “Because every time
someone meets you, they ask me what ‘my son’s’
name is,” and even now, I can’t bring up the courage
to ask her why I can’t be her son and daughter, why
I can’t be both my brother’s brother and my sister’s
sister, or my sister’s brother and my brother’s sister,
and why is it that you’re so willing to cram me into
this cardboard box you kept in the corner all this time,
and it's dry and torn up, and it’s so stifling, and so
constricting, and you didn’t even bother to cut fucking
airholes so I can breathe?! And you know I wish

that it were easy. And I wish I were more
straightforward. And I wish I could slash that
tightrope with a bowie knife and let myself
tumble down into the maw of conformity.

So sometimes, I give up. I concede. I wave a white
flag above my fortified barracks. I know I could tackle
each misgendering moment with a pen, but once
the page is more red than white, and they keep
making mistakes, keep challenging me, I see
the ink deplete until my writing utensil goes dry,

and I just get so exhausted. I get so fucking exhausted.

And I forget sometimes how hard I’ve fought

to feel comfortable in my own skin. I forget that I am
Philippe Petit on a high-wire walk between the Twin
Towers. I forget that I am a blindfolded Nik Wallenda
in Chicago, stumbling forward but never losing
my footing. I forget that I don’t live

in a box – I live on the top
of a skyscraper, and I have no walls around me,
and if someone pushes me off that crystalline pinnacle,
I will still fall between your two fences and stay right
in the middle, where you can’t build up enough bricks
to keep me in one place for eternity. Sometimes,

my memory is jogged when a student of mine,
in an unprecedented act of acknowledgment
and acceptance, asks me if I could teach him
how to tie a bowtie, and I have to laugh
apologetically and tell him that I actually
don’t know how to do that. Sometimes, I think
back on when I was a king walking through
San Francisco Pride, and Roy G. Biv was waving
at me from every corner with a tie-dyed hand,
and someone called out to me, “Young man!”
and for a moment, I was buoyant. I was a hot air

balloon, floating with nothing but clouds around
me, looking over tents and buildings in their
cramped rows and slants and geometric chaos,
far away from the Harlequins and Ticktockmen
and pedestrians and police, all demanding
some form of cool, confident order. But while
they're stuck in angular formations
with points and dots and ends, I do loop-de-loops
and spirals that do not stop for anybody. I want
an infinity sign painted on my shoulder, because
my gender identity goes on forever, and it does not
end with formula or sociological theory. And

sometimes, I remember how my fiancée’s warm
fingers tied a bowtie for me, and the heat traveled
in a circle around my neck and zipped down
my spine like a cable car sparking across its rail,
and I suddenly started crying and told her
that I felt like a circus freak, and she said,

"No," but it was a different kind
of "No" than the one that bastard

hurled at me like spoiled meat back at the bar. It was
a "No" that ironically brought affirmation, and
she told me that no one could stop my performance
because it was mine and mine alone.

So here’s to the tightrope walkers, to the boys and girls
and genderqueers and genderfluids and agenders
and bigenders and tri-genders and two-spirits
of the world. To the fans of Johnny Cash who
"walk the line," and the daredevils who avoid
that descent into the crevasse where the letters
F and M remain etched in marble, though
their edges are a little rougher, a little more faded,
eroded by wind and time and voices all rising
in pitch as they scream, “I did it! I made it!”
before inhaling, turning around, putting one foot
after the other, and walking very slowly back
the way they came.