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…

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.

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.

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!

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.