Commodity
I know its embarrasing but i’ve got this weakness for hipsters
Particularly
the extra tall, extra skinny, skinny jeans and glasses wearing kind
But all that aside He was cute, charming And it was almost alarming
how all of our favourite bands,films and fine artists agreed
Our cultural interests winking at one another as if to say
the deal is done
his forties army coat and braces flirting with my vintage fox fur and heels
after three or four or five drinks we sauntered over to the pub that
vice magazine owns
and watched some unsigned band we were both sure we had heard of
and then i felt his fingerless glove brush across my neck and we were kissing
it was wicked until we broke apart and he said (in his cute kent accent)
that he had been excited about our date because i was this
hot BLACK chick
and its not that it wasn’t a compliment exactly. maybe what bothered me
is that the word he most emphasised was
Black
I think he got it, because he quickly added that
that made me something of a *commodity* on “our” scene
and until that moment I hadn’t actually noticed
until that moment it didn’t really matter
but now the label *commodity* hung somewhere between
my bootleg chanel and american apparel and sure enough i was the only
black girl in a room of something like sixty
“you see” he said, and I nodded
and i wished that we hadn’t stopped kissing
or maybe that we hadn’t left the last bar
or maybe at least if i was some kind of
badge of chic cultural diversity that he could have
kept it to himself
so i could have left feeling that I was “hot”
not
a “commodity”…
