STIGMATA

A stigma is a wound that does not how to heal
A stain that won’t go away
A symbol of shame and punishment

Everyone wears the weight of expectation
Everyone bears a stigma of sorts
It just depends on how deep the cut really goes

A stigma is a sign of a damage that’s already been done
A scar sealed by that dreadful intersection
Of flesh and a brittle world

It’s a wound, not self-inflicted nor is it openly invited
You cannot create the wound but you can nourish it
Keep it fresh and open

Indulge the itch
Tear at the scab
Tend to it now with your own hateful hands

To be stigmatised is to be branded by somebody else’s belief
You can be despised for what’s real and what’s imaginary
But it works best when it’s both

To be stigmatised is to be stereotyped and scapegoated
Hated not for who you are but who you could be
In the eyes of most cruel observer

To be stigmatised is to be made captive of an idea
To be judged by a jury that is blinded to the best of you
And assumes only the worst

Stigma can be as certain as skin but as invisible as air
Just as hatred can be as quiet as a whisper
Or as raw and loud as genocide

You don’t need baying mobs circling a fiery stake
Or stones raining down from a vengeful crowd
Stigma is best served in secrecy and silence

You can detonate dreams with an upturned eyebrow
Your eyes can kill ambition with a sideways glance
And destroy worlds with casual contempt

I was branded as a boy
A queer child, a quiet child
No interest in sports or cars or chasing girls

I must be one of them
Although who they were was never explained
But, oddly enough, it was always understood

You couldn’t utter the name of my stigma
The source of my shame
For fear that saying it out loud might smudge the air around you

I spent my adolescence in fear of
Being one of the unmentionable and unforgiveable
One of the intolerable and irredeemable

When the word was uttered, it wasn’t kind
I didn’t know I had so many names til I heard them out loud
Poofter pansy fairy fag and many, many more

Words can wound whatever they say
About sticks and stones
Words are like weapons and my heart was hunting practice

And so I bore a stigma on a skin that saw no other shame
I was white, western, English speaking, educated, from a comfortable upbringing
I bore no other blemish

Except my feelings were for my own kind
And those feelings were more than skin deep
A stain that no privilege could diminish

Somehow I didn’t feel the sting or the shame
I didn’t feel the searing of the brand
As it burnt my skin but my skin still remembered

But even if you can numb your scar
You can’t anaesthetize the memory
Of how it got there in the first place

When I was a man, I branded myself
With a badge on my lapel
A medal of dishonour

A tiny pink triangle, a tasteful nod to the holocaust
Nicely enameled, it was how I accessorised my identity
And proclaimed my oppression

Claimed my place among the outcasts
The ranks of the rejected
Without the awkwardness of their imprisonment or persecution

It was a badge I could discreetly pass into my pocket
Unlike the symbol once stitched on prison pajamas
The number sewn into the skin, an indelible script

And although I would never see barracks or barbed wire
Or feel the tattooist’s ink, or smell the death stench of ovens
There was a prison cell waiting for me and a number with my name on it

When I was a young man I could go to jail
For acts of love deemed worse than rape
And now this behaviour is sanctioned by the state

I have now swapped the badge for a wedding band
An ornament to acknowledge me appropriate
A symbol of respectability, a badge of honour

The more I’m allowed to love, the more some feel compelled to hate
So I keep an emblem of my oppression in my top drawer
Close at hand, beside the wedding bed

As if the scars are not a suitable reminder
As if a life lived as an outcast doesn’t rule my dreams
As if my stigma could somehow be erased

But for now those who would mean me harm
Are themselves seen in a lesser light
Tattooed by their intolerance and branded as a bigot

But I still keep my badges in the bedroom drawer
A single pink triangle interrupts the sea of righteous rainbows
I will wear them again when the world makes me weep

There’s nothing special about stigmata
He says to me helpfully
It simply means the plural of stigma

Tell that to the painting on the wall, I think
Right above my partner’s hospital bed
As the nurse wrestles with stiff linen corners

Christ is pictured with an up raised hand
The palm bloodied by the stigmata of violent crucifixion
The face serene, offering implausible hope and comfort

When we receive stigmata, it is said,
God is showing us his favour
Although the blemishes on my love’s body are far from blessings

The stigmata is a symbol of salvation
Of sins washed away in the blood
In the blood, in the blood of the lamb

But it was blood that bore the grief in the first place
A blood borne virus from which no one was immune
But from which some would suffer especially

The stain of persecution, but unlike the prison camp
There is no emblem sewn into his pajamas
There is no tattoo ink on his body to bear witness

The only ink that is shed is for the hateful headlines
The slanderous speeches and the poison pen
Spilling as much venom as the page will hold

So who is the new taboo?
From whose bones can we hold banners
From whose carrion can we tear the cloth

Who will we make into a monster
To reassure us of our humanity
To remind us our more civilised selves

Who will be this generation’s pariah
On whom can we heap hatred
On who can we dump our shame

Who will die for my sins
Who will wear my wound
Who will bear my blame