NAILING THE SOUL BACK INTO THE BODY
One nail at a time
Or taken all altogether
The nails tell a story
The story is a lie
You are not the colour of your skin
The sex of your body
Or the calluses on your hand
You are a blossom
Rooted in the earth
Soaking up the sunlight
Of a hundred billion stars
When I was a kid
We were nailed into our bodies
There were things a man could do
That a woman never could
There were places white could go
Where black would never be allowed
And always, there was the enemy
Foreign bodies, just across the border
Across the ocean
Across the wrong side of the tracks
Vietnam
Blew my mind
The Vietnamese people were fighting off
The most powerful imperialist army
In the history of the world
My country, my army
But they were the freedom fighters
We were the invaders
Truth, Justice, and the American Way
– all my life I had believed this lie
Now everything changed
As I looked at the world
Through Vietnamese eyes
Bring The War Home, we chanted
And the war came home
Not as a curse, but a gift
As an invitation
Join us
And we did
Revolution
Was like stepping into a different dimension
Everything was turned inside out
Two, three, many Vietnams
Asia, Africa, Latin America
Home of the Brave, Land of the Free
Bad was good
And what I had thought was good was
Monstrous
Imperialism
I had never even heard that word
– outside of a sword and toga movie
But once you start digging up bodies
You find them buried everywhere
Bring The War Home, we chanted
And now I could see
The war was already here
I could see freedom fighters on every corner
And I could see the enemy too
We carried the enemy on our backs
Nailed into our bodies
What is the human soul but the body unleashed
The body set free
The body in all its mystery and secret
In all its possibilities
In all its interconnectedness
I am not as strong as the tiger
I can’t swim like a fish
Or fly in the air like a bird
What makes me unique
Is you
I speak your words
I sing your melodies
I dance to the music of you
Freedom is not some king in a mountain fortress
Master of all he surveys, beholden to none
Freedom is you, your body
In all its frailty and power
Hopes and fears
Hunger and thirst
Freedom is you and I
Feeding each other
Food for the stomach
Courage for the heart
Ideas for the imagination
Capitalism hates the body
Capitalism fears the body
Capitalism wages war against the body
Because the body can’t be trusted
The body breaks rules
Race, nation, gender, class
These things do not exist inside our body
They do not belong to us, we belong to them
It’s how we are nailed into the machine
How we becomes its working parts
And of all these, gender is primal
It attacks what we are
On the deepest level of our biology
Sex is the body, the human animal
Gender is capitalism, trying to ride the tiger
Gender is the spur and the whip
And you can’t get away from it
You can’t have no gender
– anymore than you can speak without an accent
It’s a gendered world – them’s are the rules
And either you break’em or you don’t
But whatever you choose
You’re punching in a bar code
Gender abolition – as if we could
Gender is a nail that gets pounded into each of us
Gender Identity
Is the scar tissue that forms around the nail
As the body tries to heal itself
But it can’t heal
Because the nail is still there
And it’s not going away
Because the problem is not just the nail
The problem is the hammer
That keeps pounding it in
Learn to love the nail
Does not work
Because if you don’t push back
It just goes in deeper
So you gotta keep on pushing back
Forever
Or else you gotta get to the hammer
And get rid of it
Not pass it on to somebody else
Get rid of it
Unleash the body
Liberate the soul
And free the world
