What More Could You Ask?

Context elevates bad experiences,
An enthusiastic homage to… let’s call it eternity,
Mouth moving both ways,
Semicolons inserted for emphasis,
A magical pass.

Stacking words in the way of wisdom,
Kissing a path to memory, curiously lusterless;
Neuralgic nostalgia is a thorny back road,
Unbright, dusty, unPlankian,
And we could tread the purple road bright ahead.

Lock steps into wifery, objecting to
Reflecting one state of womanhood,
Harmonising adroitly into stillness,
Spilling meaning into the gaps between
Have and not.

Begging for scraps of song
Should not be our lot,
Pixelated into endlessly editable scripts,
Charged and charging
Into marked-up pages, endless and ephemeral.

We are leaking nightmares,
Plumbed into history, toxic with possibilities.
We can seize the waters, balancing futures,
Listening to the flood, forgetting pressures,
Stressing old-school remedies. Day after day.

We break down the meaning of names,
Settle liquid scores,
Talk of ambition’s blizzard and
Swing hips in glossy flossing,
Consider pianaoke.

Time to pitch, toned up creatures
Singing myths in the liminal, lurking in
The dark, harking back to when hunting
Meant something other than chasing
Grades and pay checks.

Resentment is a film through which we
Filter memory, waiving the right to our spot,
Clotted with the scents of home and pain.
Do you want the core of the artist, the
Consciousness, unconscionable; bitter and burglarised?

We earn art in the reconstruction,
Cupped in the moment, you, you, U,
Sneezed size breathing salt,
Slapped with sensations, tipped, tripping,
Tricked, cut down to size, a light touch.

We dream of legacies, embedded in larceny,
Rewarding failure, chronicling the
Chronically ironic, chasing the sugar,
Shifting market forces, contorting
Culture into a twist of dough.

We dream of adorning the menu of memory.


Another live-writing exercise, this time celebrating the open mic for Cambridge University's ICE Creative Writing course and their residential module on writing for performance. The same terrifying level of quality as last time I attended this, and another dazzling array of inspirations to draw from. As ever, the temptation to edit (there's some inelegant variation in there!) is high but resisted…

Bridging Words

(Was asked to perform as a feature at Speakeasy, a Cambridge University slam series. I haven't done a crowdsourced live-write poem in ages. Behold. This was particularly easy, in some ways, as the quality of the slammers was ridiculously good.)

We are a collusion of
Percussive ooze,
Encouraged to fashion
Gratitude and mad grats
Into clicks and pigeonholes

Friendship is cross-stitched,
A work of alchemy and memories,
Creased with intricacies,
Meaning littered into the gaps
We hop across and peer at,
Peripheral visions.

We fill the dark spaces between
With glittering sticky tape,
Better living through chemistry,
Embracing our right to be happy,
Glorious monsters, intertwined
Through all those hungry nights.

We reflect on ourselves, spun sugar arguments,
Consuming ourselves through
Nervous resistance, cold numbers
Drowning in abstract blood,
Summoning the guts to

Stand up against such a summary.

Today is an improvised battle with technology,
Struggling to care through
Solipsistic prisms manifesting in
Silence, the places between words,
Churning familial duties and the need to
Hold hands through the smoke.

We are mapped in fragments,
Coiled in a double-helix of hiraeth,
Bellows of frozen breath,
Optimistic billows of red, sunset litanies
Written into our flesh, rusty and fragile,
Irresistibly strong.

Love is cupped into twelve minute
Segments of looks, words, warm,
Distressing vertigo, tiny death
After tiny death, teetering forever on
Concrete edges, crumbling, rumpled,
Shored up by broken bits of unsaid words.

Guilt is a stained-glass exposė
Of the deconstruction of self,
More-or-less deftly stitched with ripped-up time,
Vacationing in costumes,
Hidden in plain sight,
Skirting the abyss in all of us.

3am chimes a tightrope of teetering meanings,
Gasping for layers,
More than simply okay.
And we drown in the toxin of adrenalin,
Tintinabullation along glittering nerve endings,
Sending us back to speak truth,
Dark words dancing in the spotlight.