About Jasper Murphy Website

This is where I put things what I wrote. I write things that are fiction and things that are not fiction. Use the links at the top to navigate.

If you would like me to write something awful for money please get in touch.

Work

and the rioters on the street
a beat beat beat
boop boop boop
assemble the barricades in my heart
calling the outcry

and these perpetrators…

boop boop

Stealing money from the till is difficult. All the purchases are logged electronically and checked against the money in the till at the end of every shift. We use weighing machines for coinage and there’s room for a reasonable mistakes of up to about £2 discrepancy. Although that much every night would cause suspicion. There’s always a discrepancy though. And don’t forget the money you nick would add to the discrepancy already there. So if there’s a discrepancy of £1 and you nick £2 then you’ve gotta log a £3 discrepancy. That’s pushing it. Anyway, £2 barely makes it worth it.

and when we march through the streets
our trumpet calls
brap
brap brap brap
boop

I could use the staff discount code but with a normal customer- so the till thinks it’s, say, £7.50, but the customer’s paying full price, say £10. So I pocket the £2.50. Doesn’t work if the customer clocks that the till’s saying ‘staff discount £7.50′ though when I’m asking them for a tenner though. In which case I might as well say that it wouldn’t work ever.

oh the light, dancing free,
when it our chance,
fell it

when you’re over we are now
when it’s
when it’s over…

There’s probably some way of over-riding the till. I mean there is of course but in a way that means you can get around the till log at the end of the day. The only way would be to account for it with a lie, say there was an error of some sort, but then you can’t do it again, you’ve made yourself known. There’s probably a way, hacking of course, I could hack the till. I’d have to learn hacking first, which could take a while. Once I know how to do that though there’s bigger fish to fry. Bigger fish than fingers in the till. Bigger fish than fingers. Fish fingers. I’ve never liked fish fingers. I wouldn’t want to get in too deep. Like fingers in the till is a starter drug. Starter drug? Gateway drug. Gateway crime. There’s probably some medium, not even medium, some humble, sufficient robbery that I could get away with. And small enough money that the police wouldn’t bother.

free free
we will be free
with our songs of freedom
boop
boop
boop
boop

Shop assistants are the first port of authority, I spose coz it’s us who tell people they can’t have food when they don’t have enough money. The people who treat people like shit if they’re not the winners in life. The first port of racism. There’s no one to be racist to in this little white town, so i’m just racist to rude people instead.

shop assistants of the world
rise up
rise up
take over
to the mountain over there

Stock’s the thing to steal, you’ve only the cameras to deal with then, that and annoying work-mates. Anything left around the ti

boop
boop
I hate using paypoint- stupid little yellow machine charging people too much for their electric. I always forget the right buttons to press. I like ripping off receipts. But not ripping people off. ha.

willow, through the call,
a bird,
now now,
this this,
now,
this now,
we demand this now

Stock’s the thing to steal, I could take anything left by the till with relative ease- stuff left behind by customers when they haven’t got enough money to cover it. But fags are the thing. Fags and booze, I could st

boop
boop
boop
boop
I got the change wrong again. I hate to feel like a stupid person.

Stock’s the thing to steal. I could take anything… relative ease. relative ease. Fags, now fags, and booze, there’s the thing, they’re worth money- I could sell
boop
boop

relative ease. Fags, I could sell fags with relative ease And booze. The big packets. I cou
boop
boop
boop
Where’s the ginger beer? Why ask me? When there’s a queue of about a million. And only me at the till, it’s not fa. Try the drinks section. Please don’t think I’m stupid. I hate to feel like.
boop

Fags. If I can steal a packet I’ll have one when I finish in. 2 hours. 2 hours. A fag, a
boop
boop
boop

A fag, a double cheeseburger from Mcdo
boop
boop
boop

A fag, a double cheeseburger, and a b
boop
boop
boop

A fag, a double cheeseburger and a beer.
boop

Can I steal beer? Not with any ease. Relative ease. Not with any of that.
boop

to the sky, oh so high,
the revo
boop
to the sky, oh so high
the
boop
to the sky, oh so
boop
freedom is there
boop
over, when we
boop
if we
boop
over
boop
boop
boop
boop
boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop
boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop
boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop
boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop

Ice Cream

Lapses in the park. Wants an ice cream.
Walks towards the place, the likely place, where the mill and the buildings and the toilets are. The gift shop. National Trust.

Not there not immediately. Lapses across the bridge over the river. Children with ice cream. Cornetto. Good. I want cornetto. A Strawberry cornetto. They will have it.

Towards more buldings. Direction indistinct. Where people are coming from going to. Children. Gift Shop. There’s a gift shop. A canteen. A garden centre. Looking for fridges with the bright colours and the prices. First canteen. No. Then gift shop. No.

Where is the ice cream? The child the children the child with the strawberry cornetto. They will have it. But where nowhere somewhere Lapses can’t see.

Garden Centre. Artificial topiary. Gifts. Chairs. Inconceivably expensive chairs and tables. Ugly no ice cream. To the outside bit, then.

Don’t think there will be ice cream here. Plants. People. Life. No ice cream. Life with no ice cream.

Really want ice cream. Strawberry cornetto. Fat stomach shows I’m the kind of person for it. Fat stomach white skin neat clothes 2 pounds sterling in the pocket. Cream strawberry wafer. A wafer against the shin, wafer with weird soft hair. It’s on the floor screaming red face. Ice cream splat floor. Ice Cream. Wafer child rather. She’ll know where it is they all do the wafery children with the hair they know where the ice cream is because they deserve it. Lapses takes the child by the flake. By the hand.

“Where’s the ice cream?”

The wafer’s still sobbing sniffing lung shifting. No response.

…

“I’ll buy you another.”

Screwed wet nose lung shift no mouth noise.

“I’ll buy you another.” tugs the flake. hand. “show me.”

Movement pulling direction. Small steps pull big ones. The small steps are perfect, easy. Behind them the big steps trying to compensate hitting each other stupid. Back bent down stupid. Back through the garden centre. It’s really shit, the garden centre.

Out of the garden centre through the old people with their glasses and crumbplates. The canteen, no fridges, towards the queue, no fridges. At the queue the sign the bright sign the tropical island with the clouds and birds shaped like twisters and soleros with prices. Strawberry cornetto.

Some waiting till the busy woman wants to listen to me.

One strawberry cornetto.

Then the till because the busy woman is different to the till. Because I have my ice cream but I cannot walk away.

Till woman looks at my cornetto “2 euro”, I give her 2 pounds sterling. 30p change.

I am fat.

Letter to Lima Zulu

This was part of a group show, ☺, at Lima Zulu.  The letter’s printed in the reader for the show as well as here.

7th May, 2011

Elaine O’Neil,
57 Hersey Gardens,
Alton,
Hampshire.
GU34 1HA

Dear Mr and Mrs Lima Zulu,

This is a letter of deep thanks, from the bottom of my heart, for the art and ideas that you have brought into my life.

I first stumbled upon Lima Zulu whilst sheltering from the rain after I’d missed my coach back to Alton and somehow ended up in your part of Town. I’d been to see The Cure. Do you like The Cure? I like The Cure very much. It was 1993. 1993 was when I first became ‘close to you’. ha!

When I first saw that crack of light shine through your cheap warehouse door I thought it would be an Albanian drug den or something. And to be honest at that time with what happened and the way my head was I would have been alright with that too. I’d probably be alright with that anyway, I love all that stuff. Other people are interesting. I want to be an Albanian drug dealer. Get up in the morning and brush my teeth and sigh at my face in the mirror and squeeze a spot before getting on with another day of drug dealing. I’d be good at it, I’m persuasive. Anyway, it wasn’t a drug den, it was you. You and your art.

At the time everything I saw there struck a chord with me because it made all of my anger with the boringness of the supermarket and the numbness on the corners of my boyfriend’s mouth into some sort of sense and beauty. A sort of sense and beauty that I could look at for a bit, just stand back and look at it for a bit. It gives you breathing space.

These days it’s a bit nicer, a bit more positive. I remarried and got two kids who I love to bits, the shits. My kids are mad. Kids are mad. When one of them comes up with something like putting all the shops underground it’s like one of your purple blobs on a plinth. It’s good fun and there’s a lot to get out of it once you decide that you’re going to get something out of it. Let it take your brain wherever it’s going. They come up with madder stuff than your lot do most of the time to be honest. Maybe you’ve got some competition

Life isn’t art and most of the time we’ve got to stay busy dealing with what’s being thrown at us (and with our new friend Mister Cameron we all know a lot more’s coming). But we all need a breather. It’s good for us to stand back sometimes- feel like wealthy art collectors looking at a beautiful sad painting rather than the poor sods being painted for once.

Thank You,

Hackney Pride Speech

My name is Jasper Murphy and I have a vagina. I’m involved in East London Community Activism but today I’m here to speak “as a trans person” about transgender issues. The term “transgender” is a broad term that refers to to a massive spectrum of people who in some way veer away from the gender written on their birth certificate. So, I cannot, in any way whatsoever, be representative of transgendered people. I can only talk about the world as I see it, from where I’m standing, as a transexual.

I’m a lucky tranny. First of all because I’m alive. And secondly because I have a family who loves me. That shouldn’t be lucky, but at the moment, it is. My own experience is quite unique so I thought I’d give you a quick history: At 3 years old my first sentence was “I’m a boy”, at 7 years old when I was still convinced that this was true, my parents took me to a psychologist. The psychologist said I probably have “Gender Dysphoria”. My parents talked to my school and allowed me to cut my hair and wear a boy’s uniform. When I was 8 I was referred on to a specialist in London (on the NHS) who I saw until I was 18. When I was 12 I legally changed my name which my granny paid for. So I’ve been living as male since I was about 7 or 8. I went through a full female puberty and eventually got testosterone when I was 21. I had surgery when I was 22. I’m 24 now so I’ve looked like this for about 2 years. It’s not my intention to simple ask for a complacent acceptance of trans people- for people to just stop insulting us and beating us up… I want to talk about transphobia as an issue that affects all of us- and that we can all play a part in fighting. We must, as a society, be better at gender.

In the womb we all start off as female. People who come out as little boys are changed during the pregnancy when testosterone is introduced. The clitoris grows and becomes penis, and the labia becomes a scrotum. Woman are so-called because they’re meant to be like men, but with wombs- womb-man. But in reality, men are women with big clitorises. Bigclits. Most people come out with either a vagina or a penis, but some people are somewhere inbetween- these people are ‘intersex’. As soon as we’re born boys and girls are treated drasticallly differently- boys are given lego, girls are given dolls (and then people wonder about the lack of female engineers); girls are encouraged to care and talk about their feelings, whilst boys are told to be tough. Every boy and girl, to some extent, has to grapple with the difference between who they are, and what a Real Man is. What a Real Woman is. Every body suffers from the invention of the Man and the Woman. And I consider myself an extreme casualty of this- I don’t really consider myself a Man- but I know, violently, that I’m not a woman. I think that transpeople generally are an extreme casualty of this problem.

Society is organised into men and women and I don’t fit into either. If I were to have to go to prison, I could either be a man in an all female prison, or a man with a vagina in an all male-prison where privacy is not exactly a priority. If I were to be arrested and strip-searched I’ve got a choice between a male officer or a female police officer. But I’m not a man, that is not my sex, I am a transexual. There is now a Gender Recognition Certificate so that I can be recognised as either a Man or a Woman by the state. But I am not a Man or a Woman, I am a transexual. I could be treated as a man, go to a male prison, be searched by a male officer, get married to a woman. But I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to live in a society where people are sent to prison and strip searched by police. I don’t believe in leading a fight where we’re asking to government to deal with us more efficiently, to oppress us better. I don’t want to be integrated better a rotten system, a want something different altogether. I want to take part in creating a better world.

Prejudice against transmen, that’s me, is based on the sense that we’re trying to muscle in on the privilege of being male that we don’t deserve, we are inadequate, we don’t have penises, and if we do, they’re either weird and tiny or crap. We’re inadequate men, with big bums and crap willies.

Prejudice against transwomen is based on the sense that they’re degrading themselves, they’re funny, a joke, why would you want to be a woman? They’re trying to take a step down in society.

So transphobia is rooted in sexism. Some people believe that transwomen can’t possibly know what it’s like to be a woman because they haven’t experienced sexism. But the transphobia that transwoman get IS sexism, multiplied by a hundred!

Some people say that trans men are just trying to escape sexism by turning into men. Let me tell you, when you’re a transexual, you do not escape sexism, you are pushed right into an enormous swamp of sexism. When you experience both sides and more, you begin to see the sexism, you notice it when other people don’t, when you play with gender you’re witnessing the flow of power.

Sexism, and more specifically this form of sexism which is a reaction to people’s gender deviance- not being a Proper Man, or a Proper Woman, is something that seems to be ignored. It plays a huge part in homophobia- A gay boy, who is very masculine and handy with his fists is not likely to be bullied at school. School kids don’t usually see what their school mates find sexually attractive, they see how they behave. Effeminate boys are bullied for being effeminate- and the words the kids use are gay, and batty boy, but they’re being bullied because they’re not acting like Real Men, this is sexism, but we call it homophobia. And when you call it homophobia, what organisations are there helping the effeminate straight boy? He’s being told that it’s okay to be gay, but no one’s saying that it’s okay to be a bit girly. This is the same bullying that transexual people experience in the extreme, but it is in no way reserved for us.

The experience of transgendered people is at the lethally sharp end of the wedge- and it is a lethally sharp edge, the Transgender Day of Remembrance website shows that in 2009 130 transgendered people were reported murdered- but this is a universal problem, rooted in sexism, it affects all os us and we can all take a part in fighting it.

The invention of the Real Man and the Real Woman is enshrined in the economy. For as long as someone has to work all week to get a wage, to survive, and for as long as we have babies that have to be looked after, someone else has to work in the home, and bring up babies for free. At the moment, most of the time, the man works full time and the woman works for free in the home. It’s the unpaid labour that keeps the whole system running. Take it away, and the whole thing collapses. But that won’t change by messing around with gender, or by swapping it around and turning the patriarchy into a matriarchy, or mixing it up, or by taking turns… or by paying another woman minimum wage to do the job instead. For as long as this system keeps going, someone has to work in the home for free. And this is one of the most fundamental injustices the forms the foundation of our economy. As much as transgendered people might highlight that these are not two unchanging natural roles, a liberal plea for tolerance is not the force that will bring it down.

I want to come back to this idea that we need to, as a society, as a community, be better at gender. The transition from one gender role to another is not just about surgery, in fact surgery plays a very small role in it. For the most part, transition is social, because gender roles are social. As I mentioned before, I lived for 12 years as male without any surgery or hormones whatsoever. I now fit into the category of male because people call me ‘he’ and regard me as male. The fact that transition is social seems to be lost on most people, when someone comes out as trans, people tend to wait until that person is manly, or womanly, enough to convince them. The onus is put on the trans person to “act like a man” or “act like a woman” just to have their identity respected. This often means, that for transmen, we are rewarded for acting like macho idiots, for only then will people respect our identity. It should be everyone’s responsibility to respect someone’s identity, to play a part in the journey to becoming comfortable in their skin.

What is it we want with our Pride Marches and our activism? The freedom to walk down the street, dressed how you like, kissing who you like, in a couple of expensive areas of central and west London? What about kissing in Clapton? Stratford? East Ham? What about being free in our working class communities where we actually live? When will we be free to express our love, our gender, our bodies without fear of being beaten up by gangs of teenage boys? And what about those teenage boys? Our neighbours? When will that teenage boy feel free to suck off his mate, or wear a dress, without fear of complete rejection or without thinking that that would make him an entirely different person? It might be tempting, for those middle class homosexuals who have achieved their freedom, who are happily walking hand in hand down their little street in Hampstead, to pull the ladder up behind them and not be associated with transgenders, with us deviants, or with us working class queers in areas like Hackney, who still live surrounded by homophobia, transphobia, sexism. I think we can see that temptation when we look at what London Pride has become. And that’s why it’s important to have events like this, to keep our grassroots activism, and not accept anything less than absolute and complete freedom.

Scab

When i had a horse
i kept her on the common
by a chain
long chain.

She walked about
comfy enough
ate grass
and chawed into the people goin past to the market
they had to go through the common to get to the market.
Over the abandoned runway
where in the war they flew off ta get killed and be told about
now people walk their dogs.
And we kept our horses there

She had a smooth coat nice smooth coat
i used to smooth her coat down
I saw a big grey thick scab on there and i started salivating and some movement in my belly too something to do with not feeling really right with salivating at a horses scab.

It was raised from the surface of her body by nearly half an inch. Grey and gnarled her body sable and smooth and beautiful. Her body had a line all the way around and it had to be kept to. If a fly lands on her the line changes so the fly’s got to go, so’s the line stays the same. The scab pushed the line out all grey and gnarled and fleshy under.

I took it off keep her smooth nice and smooth.
The skin under weren’t smooth it bled bad.
I knew it would bleed but told myself it wouldn’t so that i would take the scab off.

I had it in my hand i was still salivating spit in my mouth filling up filling my dick, i don’t know why, coz it something i wanted that bad inside me i suppose.

I put the scab in my mouth then the whole thing. once it starts it’s done.

The hard bit from the outside i couldn’t chew it. I moved it around in my mouth so, peeled off the fleshy bits with my teeth, peeled off everything that would peel. I ate the fleshy bits. It was neither good nor bad just the finishing of what started.

Horse was bleeding her coat wasn’t smooth it had bits caked with blood.

I panicked at what i’d done to my horse her coat wasn’t smooth.

Took a cloth from my pocket spat on it and cleaned her.

She kept bleeding. I held the cloth to where the scab was to stop her bleeding it stopped eventually.

Next day a new scab came up warped and wet.
..

Sherrif

 

5am. He gets up wearing pyjamas. Cold night it was. Runs the tap, tests it for heat, holds the flannel under and pushes soap into it. He takes off his pyjamas and washes himself. Cold morning it is. Before making tea or breakfast he gets adressed. His pants drawer full of clean pants he chooses the newest and best fitting. Let’s make an event of the day.

His shoes he loves his shoes he wants to put them on first but that’d make his jeans a problem. So he gets his jeans from his jeans corner, looking at his shoes, real shiny they are, he gets his jeans he puts them on they’re tight. He’s a slim man he likes tight jeans. He puts his shoes on. Shiny black leather pointed. He loves his shoes. He has to undo his jeans again so he can tuck his shirt in when he puts it on. His medallion hangs from the medallion nail above his bed, next to his leather jacket hanging from the leather jacket nail. He hangs his medallion around his neck. Everything has its place and everything else also has a place. His rings are in a pile on his miscellaneous table. He puts them on one by one. Cold out it is. He puts on his leather jacket. His sheriffing hat should be on his sheriffing stool but it’s on his bed. It’s okay though. He puts his sheriffing hat on. Time for tea. He’s got two mugs one green one brown he tries not to use the green one because it’s his favourite. This morning he uses the green one. It’s his birthday. Let’s make an event of the day.