Thatcher,


The sun shines metallic cobbles underfoot today,
A crowd thundering toward golden moments of class solidarity
that tomorrow your papers will call ‘vulgar’.
Wasn’t it always an attraction of repulsion?
We have waited for decades for you to return to your roots
Return to the earth
Return your pearls to the nightstand.
There’s no grieving tonight in Liverpool.
The doves are the colour of milk,
Everyone one of them,
feet dirty amongst the party balloons and beer cans.
28 rounds of confetti for you, dear Lady.
23 years of knowing your face as enemy.
The pavement pulses, beer swigs and old friends hold one another like a welcome home
Hope they blink into one another’s faces.
Coz some of us haven’t seen it since 1974 and some of us Maggie, some of us never knew it at all.
So instead
We burnt you into the air
With our prayers for this day.
After we’d long since stopped praying for justice.
Men shout, dance, Maggie is this what you imagined?
Or did you think your twin set would protect you?
A tinny taste on the tongue, I take up a stick and force out an empty thud to your stomach.
An honour reserved for the gangboss.
Dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Fuck what Owen Jones might think we’re going to dance till dusk and
you’re not even cold, laid in your grave yet babe,
We’re all chavs here, anyway
So there’s no grieving tonight in Liverpool.

Tomorrow the street cleaner
Will brush your bones towards the water.
Tomorrow we will go to work and to school,
Floss our teeth and check our emails.
The day waits like a pill on the tongue, baring headlines of
Paedophile rings, NHS failure, benefits cheats, Syria and Iraq, the Gateway to Jihad, the Rich Kids of Instagram and Blair, forever Tony Blair with his pit of a face, teeth peaking out like a joke worse than war.
Maggie, can we just have This. One. Victory?
All I can think is ‘The lady is not for turning’
Though the likeness of her face in parliament is daunting
The lady is not returning
The lady is haunting.
So forgive me if there’s no grieving tonight in Liverpool.

If I should die today... after Mike McGee, CR Avery & Shane Koyzcan.

If I should die today, I trust my housemate to hide my sex toys from my grandmother.
I give him full permission to redistribute my lesbian erotica to a closeted queer,
with sad eyes, and a quiet smile.
May it help them learn the shape of their pleasure
and some new ways to refer to the vagina.

If I should die today, you can keep my glasses,
if you promise to look through them once in a while,
take a day off now and again, and remember to breathe.
If I should die today I give you permission buy yourself flowers for no reason.
To sing in in the shower, and steal vegetables from big supermarket brands.

If I should die today, I hope my ex-lovers speak to one another and compare love letters.
I hope they forgive me for my bad spelling.
I hope they remember the nights when we swapped dreams for kisses
when the rising sun was our own personal spotlight.
If I should die today, I hope every orgasm you ever have
feels likes a personal gift from whatever god or political figure you believe in.

If I should die today, I hope you all remember how unapologetically
fat and queer and northern and working class I was.
Should you ever forget please please check my tumblr.
If I should die today, take a memory each from my memory jar.
Plant it in your pocket, grow your own happiness,
dance to LCD Soundsystem.

If I should die today, I know I'd want to be remembered as
flawed and fabulous.
So there are some things you should know.
I never really stopped thinking of Pluto as a planet.
Sometimes I was too tired to listen to you, so I just nodded.
If I should die today, remember that I would never lose an argument.
I'd just lose people.

Remember there were times when I drank too much and cried on buses,
times when I gave crumbs instead of talk to people sitting on pavements.
Times when I watched nurse Jackie rather than reading.
If I should die today, in the last seconds before I pass,
I'll be pissed off for not knowing how the novel I'm reading ends.

If I should die today, there's a story I wrote called Sirens.
It says everything I couldn't.
If I should die today, please don't stop writing letters to me.
If I should die today there's no special wisdom I can impart
no beautiful metaphor I can create
no staggering philosophy.

If I should die today, please mix my ashes with glitter,
throw them at homophobes, and tories and

anyone else who ever acts like your existence is worth less than the organic hand soap at their children's private school.

There are no words I can write in my living room at five past nine on a Tuesday night that will ever describe your worth.

But you are doing just fine. 

If I should die today, please wear fancy dress to my funeral.

Please remember not to pray for me, 

not to name a star after me 

or justify bad decisions with 'that's what she would have wanted'. 

I will only ever want beautiful things for you. 

(This includes revolution.)

If I should die today plant a tree in your garden for me, 

call it hope, 

teach yourself how it comes back to life every spring.

19

I have lived in 19 houses.

Left each one of them with bin bags.

Every one holds an era, peers into my face like a concerned teacher on days when my feet are itchy. 

For instance- Number 6 is Grandma’s cooking, mince, potatoes, Emmerdale, kids from school imitating my accent, learning to change it like shoes.

Number 8 is 90’s green walls, sick with themselves, weed smoke and coffee, tuna butties and feeling proud because Mum’s boyfriend has a car. My first nickname, Fat Pippa. 

Number 13 is endless rules, smoking and cider, being a practise test and leaving when the exam is due in nine months, from then it’s postcards and polite smiles at family functions. 

Number 5 was the worst, still plays in my mind like a line from a song I heard on the radio on days when I hear people fucking, fighting or both. This house is a massive farm, a new school my mother wearing bruises to the dinner table like her Sunday best. A bell ringing in the yard long after the phone has been ripped out the wall. 

Number 15 is generic bedroom furniture, locks on the kitchen and wearing a school uniform for a week after leaving the last place with only photographs and underwear. It is a girl who pulls out clumps of hair when her family don’t visit. 

Number 1 is near a park, is plastic tea sets and Mum, sleeping on a pull out sofa so I can have the bedroom, is matey bubble bath, but even now when playing house, there is always a break up. 

Number 16 is where Marxism becomes the only option. Is grey walls and ecstasy at the weekend, is impressing funders and income support is the local tory councillor taking publicity shots. 

Number 10 is where it all falls apart, or maybe my silence was the only thing holding it together. It is red bricks, Spanish music and wine is fuck all in the cupboards and a bloody nose for tea.

I have learnt that my goodbye’s aren’t always necessary, sometimes they get eaten with tea on the next visit. I have learnt to count passive aggressive comments like charms no longer worn around the wrist.

I am always a lodger, know how to slide next to family’s life like a Tetris piece and pretend to fit. I have learnt the three basic rules of assimilation are make yourself quiet, make yourself useful and make yourself scarce.

I can tell you the time it takes for raised voices to become raised fists, can spot an argument looming like a rain cloud in the gate of another. I know that space is power and those who take it up with noise and furniture don’t expect you to notice.

I know what it means to have your possessions tidied away like an embarrassment. I know how to take cigarettes for silence and brush my hair before the social worker comes.

I have lived in 19 houses, each standing behind me like a cross parent. Houses are like people; some of them will push you from them like an inconvenience.

I have lived in 19 houses.

I’m still looking for a home.

Advice for Writers- Part I- Sinners & Slayers

I'm guilty of a terrible writing sin & I know you are too. A sin that displays with ugly clarity, the egotistical & self serving nature of writing. Of, dare I say it, being 'a writer'? This sin does not result in the torture of fire and brimstone, but something oh-so-much worse. Because this sin is an amalgamation of all the others. 

• It is the lust for a quick fix and the self indulgence of writing not for craft but solely to self soothe.

• It is gluttony and greed. A greed that steals from itself, that wants to claim every character as its own. 

• It is sloth because it is lazy writing and makes the composer predictable.

• It is wrath because it is the inability to go beyond personal pain and gut reactions, to develop prose. 

• It is an envy of the self's creation and the resulting perversion of it.

• And it is pride because it;s the self (and not the quality of the text) as most central to the final product of the writing process.

This (most inevitable and pungent) sin is; the act of crafting ones character as mere reflections of yourself, and oh Father, I have sinned. Friends, writers, countrypersons, lend me your minds, I come to slay this sloppy and ineffective trope, not to praise it. 

Time and time again as an undergrad I spoke with peers, tutors and (OK, mainly) myself about this problem. And yes, it is a problem. If you allow every one of your central characters to be you (but in a desolate future world, but a recent recruit to the Tamil Tigers, but younger and Hungarian and about to beat some serious Stalin out of János Kádár) you are writing the same story! Your drive to write is a gift (not the scary Carrie kind) and you can use it to write the same story over and over (and bore me, your readers, your Nan and your tutors). Or, if you prefer, you can use it to explore everything, you can position yourself at the forefront of human thinking, consciousness and development. Be a renegade.  How? Well, you'll find out when I publish the sequel, won't you? 

Stay militant. 

Rembrandt's Bathsheba.

FILM ROLLS ON

 grains, congeals into-

You and I.

No breath between us and Bathsheba.

Our hips drawn together, a dance, inside Museé Du Lourve.

Later we will recreate the scene in a small apartment,

I kneel at your feet.

No breath between us but an echo where fingers and hips find rhythms.

The

drip

drip

drip

of the brass taps, keep your tempo.

The greatest and most natural movement.

Later we wake and walk the dusk light

To buy groceries.

In those days you would hold my hand in secret,

And when I fell asleep

You’d trace letters on my wrists.

Messages to me.

Nothing as sacred as those days in what follows.

Months bleed journeys

NEXT CLIP

We smoke cigarettes outside jazz clubs in the dark monotone of an acid ridden New York.

NEXT CLIP

We lock our hearts to the Charles Bridge and, dancing on the banks of the Mala Strana, throw away the keys.

NEXT CLIP

We take taxis around London, finding our palms crossed and our gazes averted in the back of black cabs.

NEXT CLIP

One day to return, we said, to Paris,

Aching in our poverty .

When commodity appears it is indeed

A very queer thing.

Painfully fashionable, we said, to revisit

The café where we had once drunk

From chipped china cups.

Dutiful symmetry

To find the city

Abounding in metaphysical

Subtleties and theological niceties.

FILM ROLLS ON

This summer it will be five years too late to

kiss your fingers.

Five years too late to

lay you down amongst your father’s book.

Let me make you a pillow of the Oxford Dictionary and play your favourite record.

FILM ROLLS

Crystallises the curve of your smile.

In the years that follow

Bombs cry down.

Each shivering and shining

Like the teardrops on windows in Paris.

Like the slow drip of the tap.

Back to that scene, Rembrandt looks on.

In a sentimental anomaly

I still hold the messages you left on my wrists.

I still read your letters

Cream paper, frayed edges.

I still smile when the calendar graces your birthday.

News of you came just three days after. In photographs I reconcile your smile with my laughter. What followed you was a five year winter. No breath between us, no more scenes to capture.

I still dust your records each November.

It is five years too late to play them

FILM ROLLS ON

devoid of action

She says when she is reduced to a shell, leave her out for the vultures.
She says watch the wind rattle through her ribcage.
She tells me to take my children to see her skull.
Tell them 'this is living'. See if they believe me. 

'How does one militantly fuck?' I asked her.

There was and awkward   






pause.
And somenervouslaughter.
And I knew it wouldn't be that much longer until she replied 'I'll show you after'

*

It was just a few hours later that she demonstrated how exactly one 'millitantly fucks'.

How a feminist COMES.

(And as for the later all I glimpsed, before like the boy in the Frost poem she 'slipped me into' that 'dark of ether', was my own gasp in the air, that slowly shattered.)

*

When I awoke it was to her feet and their strident patter on the hard wood floor.

it was to her face, bathed in the morning light, before she turned

quickly, closed the blinds,

had me writing dirty. little.lines. of poetry in the shadows,

had me praying to that most impure of all Gods,

that dirtiest of all prayers.

On that alter, where so many girls before me had come to be slaughtered.

Come to be taught how to 'millitantly fuck' and left with only

• last night's knickers on, inside out
• a vision of her in a thigh length T-Shirt
• and a copy of The Second Sex

 *

It was as I had spoken, she had decided

it was me next and for the next month bidded time

until such a moment abounded

when half closed lids and rounded eyes

she could ride that loaded seducing diatribe.

(I saw as she trembled and taught as we reconciled bodies and fought waves upon that alter exactly how militant I was)

*

And so, two months later,

at a discussion on Simone De Beauvoir,

I thought, I half imagined I had seen her

nodding through the crowd as I talked on the glass ceiling and why I thought it was more like a mirror.

When I proceeded after this premonition,

I found her more squarely set in the eyes,

more surprised at my smile.

On her T-Shirt was... Che Guevara.

So I realised pretty quickly,

that although extremely pretty

this was not she.

You see? This girl was far too well bred*

* And not as half as militant in bed.





I'm that monster from outer space
that married John Cooper Clark,
I don't like to admit it but
I'm dancing in the dark.
Dancing with myself,
at home, with the door shut
and the curtains drawn
and the telly turned up.

What lyric encapsulates how you feel at this very moment in time?

What lyric encapsulates how you feel at this very moment in time?

Answer here

It's difficult to say why curiosity killed the cat.
What became of curiosity? Now on the run.
We can safely bet that although the cat died
Curiosity suffered more. Eventually found
dead in a brothel in Scunthorpe.

The most beautiful thing in the world is...?

The most beautiful thing in the world is...?

Answer here

Dachau

A shoe or cloth and wood.
The rafters set, guarding the wall.
The chamber, the chamber, leading to nothing but fire.
Their photos, their markings.
"No smoking", no coats, yet hooks on the wall.
The shelf to be empty.
The chill of the hall.
These people were here.
I cannot touch their ghosts.
These people were here-

Three 50 word stories to enter into blog collection.

 Abbey had walked those streets for years, as a child she had stood outside Marvel's corner shop wishing for treats, not the clinking bottles her mother always grasped on her drawing back of the shop door like a stage curtain. Now she slept there, wishing on stars for a toothbrush.

The kitten. The sole object of her attention, doting  parent created a doting pet owner. Always it was stroked, and loved by the child. The fleas ended that, it had to live outside in the shed, the memory gets vague there, it ran away, she still cries fifteen years on.

A club, somewhere, small town minds and a short skirt. The blonde waitress doesn't mind being touched up, the visitor does. Barry puts his hands where he likes and throws a "lesbian" when they are removed. A blush & departure swiftly by the visitor, Barry follows, returns with a black eye. 

Memories can be 
bitter or
sweet or
both.
But you can't keep them forever
they're like bubbles,
You have to keep making new ones.

Principles vs music taste.

I can stand the rain on my window.

I can.

No longer will I "stand by your man".

...Or my man, or anyone's.

He hit you, and it felt like a kiss?

Seen that bruise on your face love?

You must be taking the piss.

The valleys and peaks
Of your toes and knees
Under crumpled black sheets.
Scattered with paisleys.
The morning light, glints dust
Around your face
Your smell; oil paint
And a spice I cannot place.
I you had never touched a paint brush
from that day to this,
you'd still smell like paint.
As if you'd baptised the smell of
Royal Blue #42 into your skin.
Our thing, you take the coloured glass oval
that hang from string around your neck,
and press it to your forehead.
"This is my magic third eye.
I can see the world through this eye".
I believed you.
Next the ceremonial placing of the
Tea Cosy,
upon your head.
Now bishop of all from the headboard, to your toes.
You're solemn.
"How old are you Grandad?"
"Ohh" the answer caught in your chest
I wait with baited breath...
"Older than God".
I didn't believe you.

No allowing for success;

deserved or not.

Not a second spared

to contemplate the

sabotaging menace

that lurks and squats

in the same squalid

corner of the mind,

self esteem used

to occupy,

and love won't find.

Not a second given

to the cause of self.

Not a healing word

in the inner prism-

mind made prison.

Not a thought of

love could pass above

the drowning suds-

a diluted result

of the person that once occupied

the tenancy of me.

Not a second glance at

the wanton hatred of

the mirror...

Not a thing left for myself.

I walk past myself,

screwed up in a ball

and thrown on the floor,

everyday,

and spit out

piteous prophesies predicting

whats is next to decay.

The First Poem I Was Taught.

The Lady Of Shallot-Alfred Lord Tennyson

Picture, if you will dear reader, a nine year old Pippa avidly awaiting her Year Five literacy lesson. The poem chosen by Mrs Brighouse, a short solemn slip of a woman, was The Lady Of Shallot.The poem was taught to us over four classes, one for every part. The overhead projector was creaked out by two sycophantic 'helpers' picked from the class of about twenty five. Projected through the dusty light on to the paper covered blackboard was the first poem I ever learnt about in a class room. Mrs Brighouse read out the AAAABCCCB form in her soothing tone and the poem rose and fell and fluttered down to our ears in an RP accent like a lullaby.

The poem its self enthralled me took me in with it's delicate imagery and lulled me into a false sense of security only to spit me out with the bitter sweet ending. I had a general liking of the macabre and mystically sinister from an early age & this poem had me. At first I wanted to be the Lady of Shallot, then I wanted to be the weeping willow, then the words, by the last lesson I knew I wanted to of been the one to write this mystical story that drew in the listener and read like a sweet song in its melancholic, beautiful rhythm.

That was that really, it wasn't as if I had just begun to like poetry, it was as if I have just discovered what I had loved all along. Me & poetry were old friends, it seemed. Although it would take many years for me to discover my exact taste in poetry had it not been for Mrs Brighouse, Lord Alfred Tennyson, those two hours in that class room & and the Lady of Shallot herself, there's a chance me and poetry would of never made this life long companionship which we have today. In that simple way, amongst those primary colours, snotty noses and conkers & marbles, my passion was uncovered to me, in the form of this stunning classic British masterpiece.

On Seeing A Photograph Of An Old Friend.

I knew you'd sparkle one day.
Outside those high fences of that school.
Outside the small minds of that village.
Lessons and books couldn't teach you how to live.
And now...my god, now, well just look at you.
A thousand heads would turn if those
That dictated your self esteem could see you now.
They couldn't predict your viberance. Full colour.
Neither could you.
But, I...I always knew you'd sparkle one day.