The boys next door.
Their voices have become my alarm clock as they smoke cigarettes in their fluorescent uniform far too bright for 7am.
When I lean out my bedroom window, bed hair, half lit eyes, projecting “boyszszs” with the voice I usually reserve for the dungeon
as I glare at them with flirtatious order
because I know that's the only way to make them stop talking.

When I go to make my morning coffee, and later my lunch
I gaze at them from my kitchen window
cold morning spoon in my mouth as I eat a few mouthfuls of yoghurt, letting my mind wonder from fury that the council didn’t tell us there would be year long construction right next to our house.
It isn’t their fault, the boys next door.
They’re just doing their job like the rest of us cursed Londoners.

I take this dirt
and get turned on by the terror that comes with tearing down a building so close to my head.
The vibrations of the earth's foundation that wake me from my dreams. Dreams of men much softer than these boys
next door,
who slap me in the face with their demolition.
Those men and their diggers, their drills, the noisy machines of which I have no name for.
Thank god for my CBD vape
cutting my throat with its relaxing affect.
I look at their tools and think of all the things they could do to me. The ones with great big claws that cut through heavy metal.
All the things I could do with them.
If I knew how to.
Oh boy, to manoeuvre such a machine.

After lunchtime I hear them gossip about man things. I only pick up on certain words before their machines distract me with their aggressive hum again.

I wonder if they think I’m performing for them
from the window as I walk in and out of my kitchen twenty times a day.
They don't know that I’m an artist / writer / erotic labourer who works from her bedroom with an undiagnosed attention deficit whose chronic stomach pain requires hourly herbal tea.
I saw one of them stretching the other day
leg up on debris.
His back arched the way stiff mans do.
The way my ex’s had that time I put a butt plug inside him
one of glossy shiny metal before my flatmate interrupted fisting my bedroom door.
I wondered if he knew I was watching, because he’d waved at me from the same spot the day before.
Later, I watched him clean his vehicle
cleansing the windows of its dusty filth.
There is an erotic dance to a man cleaning his ve-hhh-icle.
Like he’s tending to his lover in a tenderly handsome way. His hand gripping the cloth as if it were her dress. His efforts as he pushes its softness against the glass, up and down, up and down, the way he might with her.

Delicious hard hats and heavy boots.
Another stood, hands down trousers.
He stared at the machines the way I do.
I wondered if he also finds their merciless purrrrr erotic
(his hand present for longer than a casual scratch).
Blokes like that will freely do such an act. Because they are mostly only observed by other blokes alike.
And their labour does not require them to act with a certain decorum.
And their uniform transcends individuality.
And their graft removes punishment.
The boys also have a very long hose with an ergonomically hand handle.
Elegant, actually.

I never knew demolition did that elegance.
Another type of dance that boys do
spraying water into the dust.
There is a romanticism to mixing these substances
a cleansing of filth for the sake of destruction. Droplets falling with each broken edge.
They asked me what I do for a living when I knocked on their temporary door and asked to make a pact that they not wake me before 8am.

It’s always good to flirt with manual labourers.
Boys like them like bossy women like me. I’ve met many of them at work.

They looked at me like they knew my story, as if they saw the labour I do for boys like them.
Sex work is a form of manual labour,
really. In ways. We’re both doing heavy lifting with our bodies.
Repetitive motions for
men with higher means. Men that tell us what to do with patriarchal authority, so they can send their kids to respectable schools and buy houses in the suburbs with gardens and kitchen islands.

“Many things,” I said. Because if they knew I was up to no good in the bedroom above, who knows if I’d get any work done.
Perhaps they’d rev up their machines you see.
Or spray their hose into my window. In a horny language of the imaginary.
Imagining what was behind the wall they see from down below, in a mating call of hard labour
sensuality-y-y-y-
soaking my sheets and my t-shirt and my hair.
Because to them I am the girl next door.
And that would be so perfect, boys,
wouldn’t it.

Ozziline Mercedes is an interdisciplinary artist working with words, performance and digital image.

She sees Her body as the primary investigative tool: transforming her own desire and first hand experiences from within the sex industry into a research database that informs Her practice.

Particularly interested in the intersection of [erotic] labour, fetish and pop culture, Her writing style combines fantasy narrative with social myth and gender theory, through a psychoanalytical & philosophical lens.

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔟𝔬𝔶𝔰 𝔫𝔢𝔵𝔱 𝔡𝔬𝔬𝔯.