I was asked to perform as the poet for Sunday Assembly (the well-known secular Sunday gathering), 4-Oct-20, the theme for which was “A Whole New World: Lessons We Learn from Musical Theatre”. Being me, I abruptly decided the day before that I was going to write a whole new piece. (I keep doing this; I may need to have a word with myself.)

Anyway, I asked people in various places what they learned from musicals, they came through in style, on Twitter, discord, and Facebook, and here is the result (video and text below, with my part starting around 20:00):

Once More

Or: What I learned from what people learned from musicals – a crowdsourced poem.

Meine Dammen und Herren!

Mesdames et Messieurs!

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Are you ready to learn what I’ve learned?

It’s a whole new world…

A strange journey…

And I see you tremble with antici…
…

…

pation. The creation of a musical microcosm

Of reality can be costly, but don’t worry –

I’ll be gentle. You ain’t never had a friend like me.

Ready?

“And I know things now,

“Many valuable things

“That I hadn’t known before!”

And a score of reminders of discoveries,

In theatres or bundled up on sofa’d sick days,

Uncovering the array of

Human experience,

Peeled down to what can be delivered

At half the pace of human speech

Over a couple of hours, with interval.

“You don’t have to sit around complaining

’bout the way your life has wound up…”

But you can turn it into song,

Invite the world to sing along,

And maybe, at the end, you’ll feel much better

Well, connected, anyway,

And you may walk away with the impression

That ethical standards can be predicted

By vocal pitch and the presence of syncopation,

But baby, real villains don’t come accompanied

With percussive warning labels.

“But the tigers come at night,

“With their voices soft as thunder,”

And I understand more about

Found family (“you’re a Jet all the way”)

And how selling your soul (and hair, and teeth)

For safety’s a shorter-term solution

Than you might believe.

And that if you don’t say (or sing)

What you mean soon, it can be too late.

(And what a great waste of plant food

An abusive dentist makes.)

I’ve learned that “525,600 minutes”

Is shorter than you’d think

(For all it’s been a long year),

But we can cheer the facts of Hamilton’s 51 essays,

The way everything ain’t free in America,

Prickly pears are best picked pawless,

Opium wars were fought for awful causes,

The poor should pick a pocket or two,

And how (in just seven days)

He’ll make a man out of you.

And “I’m glad we’ve got this new technology!”

For seeing each other with the world locked,

Instead of jockeying for toilet roll,

We can stay home to sing along,

Not forgetting that

“Tomorrow belongs to me!”

Because not everyone who summons good intent is

Bent on the same values as you and frankly?

Nazis are everywhere in musicals too,

A true reflection of what might beset us

If we forget whose money makes the world go around…

“You’ve got to be carefully taught”

Because the more fraught messages,

Can fling up defences, but picket fenced

And bathed in tunes from dapper gents

And sassy dames

They can ring, unregarded but working

Miracles under the skin,

Buried deep in synapses that are slowly forming 

Brand new chains of meaning,

As catchy repetition literally changes your mind.

“Do you hear the people sing?”

Because the support of chorus

Is glorious, and we adore

Syncretic miracles weaving

Street sweepers and aristocracy

In high kicks and pretty harmonies.

But more than this, she tells me:

“It isn’t for the few to tell the many

What to do,” and we should choose

Which songs to sing, with whom.

“Consider yourself at home!”

Because no-one doesn’t have a place

In musicals. Can’t sing?

Here’s a comic role.

Can’t dance? Says who?!

But anyway, it’s overrated,

See, there’s oh so much you can do

Beyond the stage to make

The glitter linger longer

In people’s glee-starved souls.

“They had it coming!” apparently:

I’ve been handed horror stories of

All the incautious directors of musicals

Who neglect to check their props,

Stock up on body mic batteries

Flatter the pianist appropriately or

(Oh dear) let the band attend the bar

Beforehand. And oh, it’s messy,

But the show goes on.

And now it’s “Midnight!” (like, I literally wrote this line at midnight and couldn’t have been more delighted – yes, I need to get a life, or maybe just outside) and I need to find

An ending to this piece,

A triumphal closing chord

To call this to a halt,

And all while finding time to tell you

That it doesn’t matter that neither elephants

Nor jazz hands can make you fly,

But that life is also the song you sing in fits and starts:

Between the mundane, the joy;

Between the admin, the applause;

Between the tragedy, the soaring choruses;

And that some of these are the same things.

“It’s a hard-knock life!”

It’s true, and you could dismiss this as

Bread and circuses but for the subversive messages

Served up as hope, that “Singin’ in the rain”

Is sometimes the best way to make the most

Of things when times are tough

And that, if the chorus is large enough,

Its harmonies can overwhelm the best-laid plans

Of even the greatest single orchestrators.

“You choose.”

“What adventures we're going to have together!”

Meine Dammen und Herren!

Mesdames et Messieurs!

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Where are your troubles now?

Forgotten? I told you so…

We have no troubles here.

Here, life is beautiful.

Auf Wiedersehn!

A bientot!

Goodbye!

Lifting Jörmungandr

Today is difficult.

Send water
Send the sea
Send endless, sea-washed sand
Send ssshhhhssssshhhhhhhhhh…
Send the seawind on my face
Send the nighttime quiet, strengthening seawind
Send hearing for miles of nothing but the sea washing, the wind in marram grass.

Today prickles on raw skin.

Send blankets
Send blankness
Send an enveloping closeness
Send still air, warm with only my own breath,
Send only my own body reflected;
Send being bound in a nutshell
Send being master of infinite space
Send a horizon an inch distant.

Today is endless.

Send everything that is Not-This
Just for a span
Send singing waters, clear horizons
Send an airing cupboard with a lock inside
Send boundaries
Send an end.

Please. My skin is filled with wasps.

Do not send me extra things to lift
Even the smallest grain of sand is beyond my strength
And what seems like nothing to shift is huge
What seems like a gift is another burden.
I beg you: send me nothing at all.
Except for silence, and unspeaking love.

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…

Inside Out

So, because I was in the frame of Say Yes to More Things, I am doing #28sonnetslater. Since, up until now, this has been the sum total of my sonnet-writing, I thought I’d better get some practice in, so as not to shame my fellow sonneteers (it's a word now, shh). I asked my partner for a prompt, and got the film we’d just watched…

My mind’s a well-oiled engine, so they say;
There’s no good giving in to wanton ire,
For all the voices clamouring are fey,
Their one true prize to find my life’s desire.

This movie I’ve not seen in four long years
Can always find its way into my heart.
It shows me truth, all hemmed about with fears
That I have given up my rainbow cart.

One cannot live in truth on only joy,
For it’s true madness to be only glad,
And even treasured memories can cloy,
If they’re not leavened by a touch of sad.

And though I may be weeping by the end,
I’ll aim to leave this life my own good friend.

I know it’s flawed, as far as strict form is concerned, and there’s an abominable pun to boot, but it’s a start. Look out for the next one on the proper blog. Unless I get the desire to do more practice (and share it).

(Yes I’m nervous. Shh.)

We Said This

Suspended in ambience
We applaud wet pages,
Reclaiming acquaintanceship,
Bombing barriers.

Managing mania, we
Fragment stagnation.
Redraw our faces,
Plumbing the depths of desperation,
Reconfiguring the perfect cup of tea.

We see the fleeting,
Invisible in mirrors,
Casting a net of happiness,
Searching for silence –
Twisting in darkened, teasing streets.

We greet the weather – it’s easier –
Eschewing intimacy with coldness,
Picking bigger battles.
Flickering destinations beckon,
Swimming in fantasies of honey-sweet strangeness;
Convoluted, tantalisingly inconclusive,
Listening for friction, infiltrating freedom.

We stage childhood heists,
Pirating reflections of identity,
Shining a dark light on dreams
Of vulnerability,
Spelling out connections,
Budding confidence coming with the dusk.

We open the only locked doors,
Walk in circles, talking truths,
Rebooting veracity with clean slates,
Flushing out scepticism with the
Perfection delineated in differences,
Breaking the bad binds tied by
Cowards digging graves, making
Weakness bleed from unjust wounds.

The long and the short of this is
That obsession is for life;
A deformation devoutly to be wished.
Metaphor melds into the elegance
Of skin, and letters are fetters
Of limbs, and the glitter of
Afterglow owns us,
Marking us with stars as we
Sleep - feral, beautiful, and doomed.

And all this night words
Chain us – willing servants,
Shouldering the burden of
Lucid truths, and we are…
Gorgeous


This was another of those tribute poems where I take inspiration from all the artists who perform ahead of me and give them a stanza or so each. I really like doing this – it’s a nice way to say thank you, and also means that I focus on the poetry rather than fretting over my own set. The gig was “That’s What She Said”, run by For Book’s Sake, and the artists were, in order: Carys Hanna, Kia (?), Elysse Adjemon, Marcelle Mateki Akita, Emma McGordon, Alice Short, and FBS founder Jane Bradley. And it was fucking lush.

A Peculiar Commission

A friend messaged me this morning:

“May I be cheeky and ask for your professional poetry skills as I’m drawing a blank. A friend of mine is having trouble with a neighbour who doesn’t seem to realise that people can see into his bathroom and watch him masturbate.

“I’m thinking a limerick posted anonymously through his door might be a friendly way of encouraging him to buy blinds or at least close the curtains!”

And today’s been a right bastard, so I thought: yes, freeware poetry. So here it is in case any of you ever have need of a poem to tell a neighbour you can see him indulging in naked DIY.

Dear neighbour, please picture the scene
As we gaze out through windows pristine:
We’re glad you take time
For yourself – that's no crime –
But you might want to put up a screen. 

It’s good to take time to be tantric
In a world that can be very frantic,
But we just thought we’d mention:
It’s causing some tension
To view your self-pleasuring antics. 

Now please do not take us for prudes
And we really don’t mean to be rude
But we’d rather not view
Everything that you do
When you’re getting yourself in the mood. 

We’re feeling embarrassed as hell;
We didn’t know quite how to tell
You of our complaint
We hope this comes off “quaint”
And we hope this short rhyme finds you well.

Yeah, I know it’s not perfect, and there’s some ineloquent repetition, but hey...

Grant Me This - for #nationalpoetryday

I was asked to be one of the #BBCLocalPoets - for #Cambridgeshire - to compose a new #poem as if from the point of view of a local landmark or geographical feature of the area.

After putting it out to people via social media, the one feature that came out again and again was that of the river (in various different ways - as visual feature, bridge-bearer, punt-vehicle, houseboat-home, wildlife-habitat, etc.) and, as it stretches across the whole county, it seemed a good way to celebrate and inhabit the character of the county (bearing in mind that the poem needed to be less than two minutes long and "not political").

It was recorded yesterday, down by the Chesterton Road stretch of the river, and you can see/ hear me read it (somewhat creakily - this is my fifth week of severe laryngitis) here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b4cpv



I also went on breakfast radio to be interviewed and to perform some of it live in the studio. I am not a mornings person. It was interesting... :)

(If you want to hear what I sound like early in the morning with laryngitis, check out this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0482z92 - the segment starts at 01:46:55)

Full text below - enjoy! :D  (Credit needs to be given to Carla Keen for the line "Catch, catch, catch..." which I heartlessly stole from a beautiful poem she wrote about her love of rowing.)

Grant Me This

Birthed beyond borders,
I rise in the west,
Scrawl a course
Of eccentric penstrokes
Across this palimpsest.
With my sisters
I weave a drench of memories,
Stretching to the new day's edge.

I have carried you
On my broad back -
Gambolling new beginnings,
Fleece, stone, and corn meal,
Vellum and sand,
Two-tongued, poling solo,
Always with a weather eye
To the next angle.

You have inscribed me,
Drawing me deep into histories,
Gleaming lines sighing,
Igniting visions, lingering
In civilisation's litanies
For those who came before
And all who dream of
Divining mysteries.

I was named backwards,
Shaped by the town
Around which I curve,
A cupped palm,
A charm of siren sounds,
Enclosed and disclosing,
Ringing with myriad bell-tongues
Flooding this rich ground.

Cast me between walls
And I surge and curvette,
Beckon evolution's remedies and
Ambition's gravity,
Leaning into the gradient of Best,
Cresting sly wins at the
Narrowest of passes -
On your marks, get set.

I creak in the mornings -

Gasp and echo the endless
Catch, catch, catch…
Scratching glory etched deep
In the clutch and pull of legs,
Mist-rimed breaths, swelling shoulders,
Cold noses, and warm hearts,
Regardless of your team's net.

In the evening I chug,
Bank-huggers making fragrances
Of home - curtained and potted,
Dot-and-carry dance partners,
These happy-anchored vagrants,
Swaying, framed in gold paint,
Named for the way I spell freedom,
And tomorrow's chances

Your ancestors built me steps,
Bedecked me with loving chains,
Cross-stitching me with sighs and pigsties,
While monarchs, mathematics,
And dragons all stake their claims
As I stride on, lop-sided,
A reminder that, together,
We have made a grace of strangeness.

So Many Things To Say - a #misfitlocal poem for @youcanhub

I was invited to perform tonight for Misfit Local, a group of social enterprise-minded folk who network in a series of excellent evenings in the ever-lovely Hot Numbers cafe. I offered to do some live-writing for them (like live-drawing, where visual artists produce sketches of an event based on what they saw and heard, but, well, the written version), and they leapt on that idea.

I’ve done this before at poetry evenings where I turn out something that incorporates bits of images/ lines from other people’s pieces, and - of course - there’s the rapid-fire writing of Poetry To Go, but this was the first time I’d live-written a non-artistic event. The evening was incredibly inspirational, so brought out a fairly epic length of piece, incorporating words and images from the presenters, Carrie Bedingfield, whose story formed the core of the first half of the event, and inspired many ripples in the rest, and the “Ideas Parade” where people pitch their question and get others at the event to help them explore solutions. Oh, and the announcements at the end, versified for the sheer challenge of it and delivered by me as part of the poem instead of by the hosts...

So here it is:

So Many Things To Say

It’s a dark and stormy night,
But inside we are warm.
In here meaning links stories,
People calling across spaces,
Making intimates from introverts.

We are permissive.
Only one rules defines us:
Our love for larger questions,
And hope for change,
Of all sizes.

We are recovering from a
Stone Age hangover,
Locked into a drowning cage,
Awaiting the tsunami while
Treading water.

We are caught in a
Cycle of burning,
Turning unstructured vapours into
Toxicity, choking.

These masks lend us speed,
Outstripping competition to be
Our own goad,
Gold lingering at our fingertips,
Gripping air, gasping.

Stop. Breathe.
The rules will free us.
We need to charge ourselves
Instead of charging at
Windwills, willfully ignorant
Of our own inching destruction.

Black and white at speed will
Only gift you greyness.
Wave at the horizon,
Summon colours,
Gloves off to touch the world.

Striving alone will not sustain;
A brain that grows needs
Feeding on something more
Than treats, greeting the need
For stimulus with discipline.

Listen to your instinct,
Drink down silence,
Violence against your body
Can only be dodged for
So long, and compassion
Will sing louder than
Competition ever will.

The grit under your heels
Will dwindle when your
Vision clears;
Nearing the next hilltop,
Remember to stop -
Enjoy the view.

Making music?
Remember: practice makes perfect,
Mixing this moment
To the next,
Collecting experts,
Turning silence into dance.

And while we’re listening,
Glistening with high notes,
We can strip back the clatter,
Tell the story,
Launch the tale on
Broader oceans.

Collective ventures
Connect together,
Blending complementary
Innovations,
Taking the long view,
Seeing ourselves as
Part of the lifecycle.

Let’s see through a child’s eyes,
Bright with wonder,
Summoning the colourful moments
In every day,
And making them visible
To the wide world.

Tonight we have painted
With words and light,
Igniting images in
Other minds,
Winding our way
Into tomorrow.

And now it’s over,
For the moment,
We thank you.
You have answered these gentle summons
And hopefully had fun!

Love spreads by conversation
So make the time to tag #misfitlocal,
Globally singing praise for faithful hosts,
And the one and only Hot Numbers...

This is your night, enlighten us
If change is needed,
And we’ll heed you until next time -
The 20th of January.

Further conversation beckons
For the next fifteen,
As meaningful as you like, but
Bright or dark, hark to your heart
And grant some peace to our neighbours!

Be safe on your way,
Make changes,
Don’t wait for January -
We’ll see you soon,
Keep doing what you love!

Hope in Dark Places

Poem written for Hammer & Tongue Bristol, November 2015 - inspired by the poems of the support act and the slammers, and with a pinch of Bristol itself thrown in.

Hope in Dark Places

We have gathered in the valley,
Growing slowly towards the sky,
Waving towards blue.
We twitch dream-tails,
Ancestral bones flowing together
In blood-waters thick as cream,
Leaving lonely alone for a while.
Because the beat won't stop.

And big pauses talk of
Big ideas, gleaming across
Broken glass reflecting red-hot coals.

Leaping over the perfect moment;
Meant to be? or only a blink,
A miniscule flicker of fate...

We reach to the stars,
Burn ourselves on the change
Of nature, consumed

Brewing confusion and black suspicion,
Sometimes mugging
For the sake of stability.

Committing to spicy variety,
Mourning meatier traditions
For the sake of serenity.

Short falls summon joy,
Tall tales flailing their ways
Into gifting hearts.

Dance steps teeter into
The next breath, beckoning
Yearnings for the rain's freedom song.

We shake free of tarry coils,
Boiling with bruises, losing
Nothing but weakness.

And we are super-powered,
Showering the nation with
Greatness, oblating haters.

We have come to the valley.
And we have left it
Better than ever.

Vaulting

This is one of those "tribute to everyone who performed before me tonight" poems from a gig at The Vaults in Cambridge last night that I headlined (and accidentally hosted - long story, all a bit strange). Poets included: Robin Lamboll, a lad called Nathan, Mark McGivern, J.S. Watts, Steve Oldham, Janis Ford, a lass called Katherine, and a feature set from Riaz Moola. In that order. Enjoy!

Vaulting

We have shuffled expressions,
Clocking spontaneity;
A hero strides,
Wider than widescreen,
While we curl into plumes
Of Utopian smoke,
Delicate as eggshells,
A clutch of hillside skies;
Butterflies dance,
Shy as snails,
While we are intoxicated,
Rose-blessed, accompanied,
Blissed-out in nature
As the colours turn.

And we turn in salt-rimed
Darkness, harkening to
The past, gifting history
With prophesy,
Making our own music.

Flipside

for Jude Cowan Montague

What must they think of us?
Hands up, wailing,
Caught between arguments
That mean nothing to our day-to-day

Bodies spin in dust and blood,
Throats raw, mouths stretched
To silent screams,
Exhausted by tragedy.

Pick up the pieces
Stretch out hands to those
Too far gone to see them,
Heads sunk to heaving chests
Get on with another day in hell.

What must they think of us?
Hands up, wailing,
Baffled by arguments
That mean nothing to our day-to-day

Heads spin at images of dust and blood
Clenched jaws stretch
To silent yawns,
Exhausted by tragedy.

Click on the pieces
Stretch to electronic pats for those
Too far away to be real,
Heads sunk to comfortable navels
Get on with another day in heaven.


Jude works as a Media Archivist and is currently sifting through images from the latest conflict in Gaza. The first line comes from a social media status update she made...

Open-Hearted

A couple of weeks ago, I performed at the rather magnificent "JibbaJabba" up in Newcastle, as their headline poet, which was a tad daunting, considering the sheer quality of the open mic, let alone the featured performers...!

As it was their fourth birthday, and I kept being struck by lines people were blessing the ether with, I wrote them a poem knitted together of all my impressions of the evening up until I stepped onto the stage (if we added in the mayhem of the aftermath as a coda, it would be an even longer poem! :D), and read it to them.  This is it (possible differences from the original performance and this version are due to the fact that I had to extemporise gaps at the time, and this is my best guess for fillers):


Oration praises anything but silence
Generous heart parting hands
To embrace the waiting minds

The ouroboros snake hisses
kisses clasped fists,
Gasps up stolen
Golden handshakes

A soul's been psychedelised
Prizing nature's bounty,
Mounting the sweet, green foothills.

Dreams recall a tale
Slippery images glitter
Strangely.

Seagulls snigger,
Urban hipster birds
Skirl and shift,
Plot mayhem.

Ken's immortalised
In pithy verse,
Herding letters into figures.

Ugly night gripes every vessel,
Disgorges mortality.
Howls.

Verity beckons
Piscine kisses
Marine caresses better.

Sensitive skin tingles
Bristling into smoothnesss
Skating into napalm clarity

Ornithological torture,
Item by item,
Externalises challenge.

We are sheltered
Warm in the fire
Of a love burned to ashes,
Braced against the future.

We cup the ordinary,
Resisting the insistence
Of moneyed phalluses,
Grasp that it's all about true friendship.

Feathered fortress stands
Grand as the everyday,
Blows hard against venal incomprehension
Of corruption's nettlebed.

Understatements
Beckon us to rise
As speed is of the essence.

Street lines take us
To a flurry of shallows,
Dreaming of the deeps.

Pop goes the parrot
In glorious chorus
And we are all licensed,
Bright as buttons.

Check Twitter,
Refresh obsession.
Check Twitter.
Refresh.
Check.
Repeat. Fade.

Jewelled beauty glitters in
Underwater crevices
In place of seaweed,
Visited by fucked fishes.

Hearts hammer in the dark,
Bruised lips chain themselves
To nature.

Old wives tell of
The dark poison in the
Shadows, drawn in darkness.

Timpani talks
Takes a bow.

Protracted words
Pace on the stage,
Intricately link herbal mathematics.

We jibber and jabber
Clatter together
Words and hearts joined.
Beautiful.

Arise

Written for the first Cambridge Sunday Assembly - separate post here:

Arise

It starts with a breath
Deep as oceans,
Echoing everywhere,
The prelude to that first cry.

Dry-mouthed,
You are forgetting to remember:
You are a torrent,
The wellspring of everything

Reach out, touch fingertips
With existence,
embrace it,
Toe to toe with the moment

You are the boldness,
The heat in the heartbeat
The spark in the dark
That heralds the flourish of day

You are birdcall
And dewfall
And all that stirs before
Morning

You are thirst,
And its quenching,
You are strong muscles clenching
Before the first step

You are the elegance of
Potential catastrophe
And the forces summoned
To meet it.

And you are not the one
Who slept on
The one who kept
In darkness

You are the sunrise
You are the brightening skies
You are the one
Who opened your eyes.

Open your eyes.

You are the one who
Took breath and raised your voice
You are the billowing echo
Of making a choice.

Stand up,
Reach out, and
Don't stop.
It is a new day.