The Hellpoet

The Hellpoet is a queer, trans, mixed-race spoken word poet and writer based in the North of England. One part preacher, two parts court jester, his work tackles religion, generational trauma, queer suffering and trans joy through the lense of horror, dry humour, and strangely placed references to character actor Willem Dafoe.

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Next Time, You Get The Hose was written shortly after the events of the Club Q shooting in 2022, in which five members of the queer community (at least two of whom were trans) were killed and many more injured. It was an outpouring of my own rage at how people were so quick to praise the (cis) police for gendering the victims correctly... it seems rather redundant when they're dead, and those same police are desperately insisting it wasn't a trans hate crime, no? With the way anti trans sentiment only continues to rise I feel it sadly applies to many more situations than just that one. I based the title and a couple of lines around the theme of Buffalo Bill - a harmfully transcoded character often posed against us (trans women/femmes mostly) as an insult/to imply we are predators - reclaiming that awful stereotype as a threat. Continue to kill us, and next time, you get the hose."

IG: @thehellpoetcometh carrd.co

Next Time You Get the Hose

| am tired of writing about tonight, but

five more people won't go home alive,

and two of those bodies looked a little

like mine, and it could've been me, on some

other night, but you have an image of

us in your mind: it's ‘Goodbye Horses’, moth

chrysalis, skin suit, stall-peeking killer

in the public bathroom, so what if | just

skipped all the dancing around it and

put the fucking lotion in the basket:

they will gender our corpses correctly

and call it progress, but condolence from

the mouth of a pig is an empty ser-

mon, for what use is using our pronouns

if you use them only in eulogy?

You would sooner praise yourselves for empty

platitudes in the wake and, like Pilate, wash

your hands of the blood you spilled, than even

try to stop yourselves from getting us killed,

put our chosen names on our headstones and

tell us to be grateful while you shit on

what few rights the living have when the door is shut,

EVERY TRANS SUICIDE IS A MURDER,

but the Lambs you cull are fucking human,

and for as long as our own are silenced,

the rest of the flock

will never stop screaming.