Skins
It’s not like you don’t turn me on.
Every time you walked past
I thought, She’s fit.
Come-to-bed eyes.
We both want to
feel my skin
against your skin.
It’s not like you’re on
or I’m changing into
a woman. It’s my past.
Look into my eyes.
I just wanted to fit
in. A misfit.
Mixed race but light-skinned,
brown hair, blue eyes,
bootboy with a hard-on.
I passed.
I had to.
Then I got this tattoo.
I did it in a fit
of rage. It soon passed.
You want to read my skin?
Whatever turns you on.
I closed my eyes
and put my soul on ice,
denied a black dad, too
terrified to let on.
I wore the outfit,
marched with the skins.
I don’t like to talk about the past,
I hate my past.
My big lie reflected in their eyes,
their hatred in my skin.
With this tattoo
I’m a walking Photofit.
That’s why I keep my clothes on.
It’s past midnight. I’ll call a cab if you want me to.
But your eyes know how to fit
a condom like a second skin. Come on…
Patience Agbabi’s most recent collection, Telling Tales was a radical re-voicing of Chaucer and the Canterbury pilgrims, ablaze with the “rum ram ruf and rym” of modern London. This week’s poem comes from an earlier collection, Bloodshot Monochrome, a miscellany of themes and styles but also featuring lively-witted exchanges with literary traditions. In Agbabi’s “Problem Pages” series of sonnets, for example, worried famous poets – ranging from Henry Howard to June Jordan – write “agony” letters to “Dear Patience”, to which she judiciously replies. Agbabi characteristically makes poetry an opportunity for conversation with the past, not swamping it but setting new lexical terms.
Skins, from the “Monologues” section of Bloodshot Monochrome, marries the free-style of dramatic monologue with fixed form. Giving it an idiom which is oral rather than literary, Agbabi enjoyably reconnects the sestina with its “performance” origins in troubadour poetry and song.
Skins is a kind of spoken-word sestina, with a fast, edgy, colloquial rhetoric that ripples off the page. The vocabulary is crucial, and the six repetands are versatile little shape-shifters: “on”, “past”, “fit”, “eyes,” “to” and “skin”. Even the most change-resistant noun – “eyes” – turns up in the guise of “ice” in stanza five, with a revealing nod to Eldridge Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice. “Skins” in the same stanza, and in the title, importantly identifies the speaker and his culture: he’s a (reformed?) bootboy, a skinhead.
The star performers are the prepositions, “to” and “on” – especially the latter: “turns me/you on”, “it’s not like you’re on” (perhaps menstruating?), “hard-on”, “let on,” etc. Little or large, the shifts of meaning in the repetands contribute as much to the poem’s pace as the brisk rhythms, but the importance of the syntax in sustaining the idiomatic pitch and tempo shouldn’t be overlooked. Those repetands are curled up, like stones or feathers, in the stream of rhetoric. All its twists and turns (flattery, explication, exclamation, direct address, inner monologue) are enhanced by the triple-pattern of word-repetition, line-ending and sentence-flow.
The poem seems to start in the middle of a conversation – one that has provoked the speaker from cheap chat-up line to costlier persuasion tactics. “It’s not like you don’t turn me on,” he protests in answer to an unheard accusation, maybe an uneasy self accusation. The speaker’s seduction plan hasn’t got far, and, as the one-sided dialectic flows on, most of the trouble will be shown to be with his relationship with himself.
Skins increasingly becomes one Skin’s confession. He has “denied a black dad …” (the most powerful of his admissions) and he has “passed” (that is, an end-note tells us, he has been “mistakenly accepted as a white person”) and “worn the outfit” and “marched with the skins”. These self-descriptions, without being over-specific, denote and acknowledge a racist and perhaps violent past.
The sestina inevitably functions as a form of hide-and-seek. Here, it helps the narrator’s psychological complexity to emerge. Glimpses appear, only to vanish in his disguises. The “walking Photofit” is a particularly telling image. With the help of his genetic inheritance (light skin, blue eyes), he has put himself together like a jigsaw of other people’s suspicions and stereotypes. His all-important tattoo is left to the imagination, but we learn he had it done “in a fit / of rage” and it shames him, although he makes a joke of it (“That’s why I keep my clothes on”).
Self-revelation in a dramatic monologue is usually inadvertent, and part of the reader’s uncomfortable fun is that it incriminates the speaker without his knowledge. Here the protagonist is in on his own secrets: he’s candid with us about what he knows and hates about his past. The sixth stanza could be faking the anger, but somehow, I don’t think it is. The diction is too blunt for pretence. He has got over the denial, felt others’ hatred, and recognised his own. He could be self-deluded, if he’s thinking sex can save him, but who’s to say the woman he fancies – “fit” in various senses of the word, and clearly an unusually good listener – would not help deliver him into his identity? The wonderful phrase, “read my skin,” resonates on many levels. It’s what the speaker most desires, though in the last three lines of stanza four, he disguises his need by pretending it is the woman’s. His worries over identity are compound; related to gender and sexual performance as well as race. See his earlier, mock-comic assertion: “I’m not changing into a woman.” After all, it’s the “bootboy” who boasts the “hard-on”: his alter ego might not be so sure. But his fears, by the end of the poem, seem unfounded.
The man’s tone in the envoi is both sexy and gentle. He’s increasingly likeable, especially when he says “I’ll call a cab if you want me to” (as long as he means it) and, finally, in the reference to the condom, which he imagines will be fitted on lovingly, “like a second skin”. If he’s turning into a woman, it’s in a good way, and maybe we readers of all genders and skins should be woman enough to trust him.