gaze into a sharper eye
by Devon Turchan
They could quietly live among the rest, working with no fanfare. Humble in invisibility, a sound type of good. To softly move. To breathe.
But if religion is in the flight of breath, human nature might be in the fight. It always seems to be found so. After experiment after experiment resulted in hearts racing and blood pumping as the evidence of a moment lived, if not a moment present.
Merlin wears the hat with stars and moon and grows the beard, now looking the way only a wizard could — and performing the only tasks a being that looks like that should.
Adopted features inform the work already being done.
And the dark circles are gone from under my eyes, which reminded everyone, I’m sure, not just me, I’m sure, of the skeletons, which we’re all working to become.
And even my freckles, once-in-a-while, erased. And my lips the size the really are but more visibly the shape they are. And eyelashes as long as they really are. But more obviously so.
And maybe because we are magic. Maybe the wizard must look the part.
It was never a choice to try to blend in. And maybe it would be lying if I did. Or tried to.
And isn’t lying one of the easiest ways to block your own spiritual magic.
Painting my eyes bridges the gap between the future I’m hoping is created, that we can create, and the past that my parents were always bringing up to me … reminiscing about their parents’ hey days instead of their own to me.
From the corners of my eyelids, to raise the shape of my eye to look up more, to see the people we’re tasked with facing in a day
Standing on a sidewalk square in Chinatown, New York, I held my head up to feel the sunshine on my cold face and chest. And I breathed deeply.
And I noticed my solitude in the middle of a busy intersection. The people passing by me couldn’t see my eyes, lined in ancient blue calcium copper silicate.
Above the blue, forest greens and deep navy and gold and acid green and yellow and orange. And under my bottom eyelash mascara, rust.
This morning, the smell of the mascara was wet and toxic. Paint my face. Sharpen my Eyes. Add intrigue.
Persona carved out.
A modern tramp. A perraneu clown. A glamorous movie star. An unapproachable godx of no gender or discernible upbringing. A challenge to the very idea of gender and humanity.
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“I am a 30 year old man wearing makeup” sounds ridiculous to say to myself whereas “I feel so much better today with a little under eye makeup and mascara” sounds soothing and healing. In the way I want to feel healed by the world and reciprocate the act.
Looking people in the eye is easier with a masquerade doily of paint scrawled around my eyes. And being high is easier.
To paint on an attitude seems no different to me than to amp up an attitude through vocal tone or feigned eyebrow lifts of engagement.
A man stopped me on the street this summer and asked what my loud, androgynous clothes were about and I said it really allows me to share moments more easily with people.
It’s disarming. If it’s not alarming.
It’s also the reason aggressors kill trans women because there is something inherently (to them) confusing and anger inducing about the gender bending. My aunt once told her adult children they could be killed by going out with me if I was wearing short shorts and platform Melissa sandals.
But if there’s no gender, there’s no confusion.
Living louder and harder and more intrusively as to insert my oxygen into the clouds of human thoughts and dreams and hopes and pain and trauma
Isn’t harder than living quieter and beneath the surface.
At the beginning of the decade I was dating a German man with the sense of style you might associate with a European gay man
He liked skinny, skinny, dark black jeans and sailor sweaters and brown driving boots and
So did I
And I wore striped tee shirts and super short khaki shorts with a thin gold-buckled belt
And I wore gladiator sandals we bought on a trip to Santorini.
And he hated my body hair. And he forced me to moisturize. And to preserve my youth.
Eventually I had to leave it behind to find myself again.
In the middle of the decade a ballet dancing blonde who preferred a more casual dress for me.
They all take the blank canvas ad run too far with trying to paint on it.
And now, I can’t, any longer, take that into consideration. I paint my eyes the way I want to. And I live as a glowing neon sign of living without fear of the fearful.
&
the staff of perraneu works within a framework of paying that has been plucked from the near future
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