Transcript: Tainted Truths of half-forgotten lives

Tainted Truths of half-forgotten lives with extracts from “Liberty in Restraint”

Written by Barbarella Karpinski and Performed by Davina and Barbarella Karpinski

Davina

Introducing our fifth speaker.

They create art that is provocative, polarising, edgy and felt, tawdry and tarnished. They now moonlight in the Strip bars, with a blend of sultry struts and outdated pop culture references, their writing is reverent, ironic and violently oblivious to age and gender norms.

They drift to a dreamy space where they flaunt their nefarious, lascivious and bittersweet humour, mainly bitter.

Karpinski has been rescued from the bordello, squeezed into flimsy age, inappropriate vinyl spruced up and reinvented for a new generation of careers Like-a-versions abound. But the original is still here.

Here, give it up for Barbarella.

Read your poem diva.

Barbarella

This poem is for the bitchy ghosts that haunt me. The ghosts of yesteryear. They curse me about my new friends. They say the spoiled sirens haven't got your back. ‘Girlfriend. Our legacy. They eat it for lunch’

‘Tell those bratty bitches, those Internet angels tell those little pillow princesses that you hang out with now, that I'm dead.

… Just to get out of that rented apartment, find a street corner and make it their own.

See if they can survive’

‘Remember Me’

Haunted voices, the ghost of dead sex workers talked to me missing since the seventies. Some of them say: “Give us a poem, love... it's boring. Being dead. Entertain me’

I retort. “F off. It's the middle of the night’

…

I dream of that brothel of yesteryear. It was a madhouse of lost representations. They do “haunted history tours” these days, you know.

They remember the past differently to the way I do.

Candy knocks over a bottle off the shelf. Poltergeists, not so sweet. The dregs re-appear.

Wait…

Unkempt, unruly spirits appear.

 I'm hearing voices I tell my $300.00 an hour therapist minus the Medicare rebate

She takes notes as I rattle on about the unhinged hooker dreams and the haunting... Making some disability concession of $5.50. I pay them in change.

They call me venal for taking money for sex.

They give me pills to quieten my dead hooked dreams gurgling in the gutter.

Dirt water.

They Go along with your psycho tag. I say “I write poems, you know, poems dedicated to dead hooker ghosts, trans* lives, diverse lives unlivable then. 

Meet ups in my musings. Pet Shop Boys hook up with West End Girls, We all performed hair, beehives. Gorgeous, tired Trans*.lives/.

On corners, no safe houses, only street tricks. I take refuge in a brothel daze.

Undercover cops lure candy Melody and Nicole to the backstreets and outskirts.

The cops don't come to protect queer. Tweaked and intimate tags.  I notice.

City lights reflected in the gold and red sharing bodies. It's 1978 and I danced to Patti Smith, bisexual rock goddess. Moments are raised by binary scribes. 

Then that's not my iteration I wish, but I don't remember it that way, because the night belongs to us, to lovers with breasts dripping over your face.