(POEM) Butch/Battery/Electric by Parel Joy

In this latest post from our Digital Dreamland series, Parel Joy's poem offers the galvanising force of butch, charged with survival, transgression, queer time and literature's mediating fantasia.

Butch/Battery/Electric

Into the Hole!

Whitman sang the body electric in Leaves of Grass: breathless erotic

Free verse. Electricity in the transcendental sense:

Poet as Messenger. Spiritual Body in Spiritual Nature; Soul

And Body all the same, ‘Electric’ nowhere to be found

But in the title. The Victorians were so busy

Domesticating electricity. Pushing it through wires & bulbs

But for Walt, electricity struck like lightning, inspiration, thought,

Adoration. Holy Holy Holy Holy Holy Holy Holy Holy Holy 

Holy Holy Holy Holy Holy Allen Ginsberg’s breathless free verse made of

This body electric. ‘Footnote to Howl’ in more breathless erotics. Which way

Does your beard point tonight Walt Whitman self-referential

Megalomanic sense of standing at a vital crossroads in literature, which I guess is

Somewhat true. Bodily cavities too, holy and hole-y.

Breathless body list poem once more in K. Patrick’s ‘Butch’ but more 

Self-consciously so. Whitman’s body / Ginsberg’s body / Patrick’s body: a list of 

Masculinities, admired erotic electric. 

Patrick’s ‘Butch’ liberates the cisnormative museum of its prison. Starts with

“I am butch in this museum, the museum is butch too” and builds up to

Everything, everyone butch until eventually: “butch electricity 

Throbbing through the walls, / butch power station humming somewhere 

Outside the city.” (Patrick)

Whitman: bodily pulse, “O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only,

But of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul!” (Whitman)

Patrick: throbbing electricity, interconnective butchness as 

All is butch in this poem.

Butch electricity runs from the power station, therefore

Butch electricity runs through the formerly cisnormative museum with its

(Crucially) Mussolini era courtyard, thereby undoing all its institutional cisness, 

Revolutionising from within. 

Jules Gill-Peterson writes that no one is cisgender.

“How can you tell if someone is cisgender?” You can’t. 

Our modern sex/gender division was adopted and in turn “gender became cis. 

And what’s ‘cis’ about gender from then on is the way that social norms can be

Coercively enforced to prevent the perceived stigma of being different.” (G-P)

“Cisness is not a state of being, it’s a set of operational norms that we use to

Discipline people’s gender and punish their transgressions.” (G-P)

Butch is never cis: always a gender transgression, its expression always subject

To policing. When butch electricity powers,

It takes the whole set of operational norms that discipline & punish apart

& Runs things anew.

In Patrick’s ‘Pickup Truck Sex’, we watch “two strong people in white t-shirts fuck 

Across the bonnet of an old pickup truck” (Patrick). 

Patrick fantasises about being both bodies at the same time, 

Both the fucker and the fuckee, 

Two supposed opposites contained in one person. 

Returning to butch electricity: polar opposites, think positive and negative terminal

Also contained in a battery powering things.

Just like the car has a battery powering its ignition 

Under the hot metal hood of the pickup truck the two people fuck on. 

The final poem in Bodies not mine, ‘A’, concludes with

Frank O’Hara’s writing on holes. Can be applied here again to the same 

Battery-like desire as in ‘Pickup Truck Sex’: 

“Activity and passivity in equal measure at the same time: that’s the role of  

The hole.” The hole becomes a battery, contains both positive and negative, 

Active and passive, electric. Activity in passivity; passivity in activity. 

Holy(!) Ginsberg’s intentional pun: the hole, containing two polar possibilities, 

And therefore an energy source: Battery. The hole transforming, electric

By refusing a singular role.

Audre Lorde wrote that the lack of linearity and room for fragmentation 

That poetry provides offers room for poetry’s revolutionary quality: 

“Within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional 

Dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive” (Lorde 28): 

Poetry is our means for survival.

What are gaps between words if not holes? Gender liberation will happen 

In the fragmentary and nonlinear hole-poetic, in the gaps (holes) between the words. 

K. Patrick concludes on a Lordeian note, against linear thought over feeling &

Against linearity over queer time and space: “At the / pub we usually share crisps. 

Breathe along each other’s wounds. 

Choose / not to go ‘forward’ but everywhere else” (Patrick). 

Bodies not mine sings the body electric through a butch hole-poetic. 

To undo gender is to embrace this poetic, polarity of the holes between the words,

Butch-electric energy coming from transgressing prescribed norm,

Desiring to be more than one thing.

The hole (“I include wounds”, Patrick writes, “O’Hara didn’t always”) (Patrick) is 

Battery, and through its multitudes a source of energy;

Poetry is often fragmentary, often nonlinear; poetry is our means to survival 

Against the oppressive force of the rational, linear, heteropatriarchal narrative.

Electricity daring to flow outside institutional cisness.

Too many fear the gaps of poetry, the (gender nonconforming) hole as 

Site of multitudinal queerness. 

Perhaps it has been our main source of energy all along.

Bibliography

Gill-Peterson, Jules. ‘When did we become cis?’ Sad Brown Girl. 4 June 2021. https://sadbrowngirl.substack.com/p/when-did-we-become-cis. Accessed 21-28 March 2023.

Ginsberg, Allen. ‘A Supermarket In California.’ Collected Poems. New York City: Harper & Row, 1955. Accessed through Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47660/a-supermarket-in-california on 21 March 2025.

Ginsberg, Allen ‘Footnote to Howl’. ibid. Accessed through Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54163/footnote-to-howl on 21 March 2023.

Lorde, Audre. ‘Poetry is not a luxury’. Sister Outsider. 1984; repr. London: Penguin Classics, 2019. 25-27.

Patrick, K. Bodies Not Mine. Glasgow: Rosie’s Disobedient Press, 2022.

Whitman, Walt. ‘I Sing the Body Electric’. 1867, repub. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45472/i-sing-the-body-electric. Accessed 21 March 2023.

~

Author statement

I type you a love poem. Nervously electric, heartbeat pulsing into computer. Binary code is the necessary form in which to convey my desire for something that is sick to the stomach of binaries. I’ve spent two thirds of my life building a self on the internet, translating all I’ve ever wanted and been, into this code. Binary code divides everything into positive or negative, zero or one, hole number or stick number. Obsessed with categorising. It fascinates me. I feel a need to dream that there is something other, more mystical, than only zeroes and ones, negative and positive terminals, and that the energy of being both at the same time, neither, or something else entirely, exists and has to find somewhere else to go for its outlet. I return to the hardware behind the code. Pulsing from the keyboard back into my hands, perhaps, I find a body electric of sorts.

~

Author: Parel Joy

Published: 8/4/25