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.