1) - My Life as a Disabled Gay Black Woman

I choose my food
based on personal preference.
I enjoy preparing
and eating it.

I set my home up
in a manner I find agreeable.
I find my partner
rapturous and infuriating
in almost equal measure.

I would lay down my life
for my children
and I fear the world
on their behalf.

I endure
and enjoy
a particular set of experiences
which will never be repeated
but can be broadly understood
by anyone
with a passable degree of empathy.

I speak for no-one
but myself.
I am more involved
with the here and now
than I am
with centuries
of cultural history.

I modify my behaviour
based on the company I am in
and there are aspects of my life
which are no-one's business
but my own.


2) My Life as an Able-Bodied Heterosexual White Man

See above.

Primary to pastel
to lights, darks

to static and noise
to nothing.

The old man ice-axes
memory mountain.

Some echo, some glimpse
of all he's lost

is all he seeks.
But all there is

in unpictured void,
scuttling, spidering

denying the light -
a parasite alphabet

barring windows
spinning webs -

the words for which
he once was famous

******* the juice from
all they ever meant.

While lesser spectres
span the spectrum

dreams and photons
undrowned in ink.

In long
September light
Knocktinkle viewpoint draws
elastic shadows over rocks
and minds

Buzzard
like a hyphen,
a golden-feathered pause
between these eyes and everything
they see

I have
no thoughts up here.
They stayed below, waiting
while I saw sunset stripe the hills
with gold

This land
tells tales to those
who have not lost the tongue
But I, a stranger, look with love
and guess

A glen
where witches danced
and weary hunters trod
tonight rolls peaceful down towards
the sea.

The happiest race
that ever lived
had a supreme deity
they called Ygrroxxblqnrrgubnipotrwwwwnququti
and because they could neither say
nor successfully think
his name
they put him completely from their minds
and got on with their lives.

I might have been twenty
when I had this thought.
Good family, material ease -
she really should
snap out of it.

This was before
I'd ever stumbled
into fruitless darkness,
when mood and circumstance
seemed one and the same.

I thought myself magnanimous
when rather than judging
I rationalised.
"Perhaps we're hard wired
to seek problems to solve,"
I pondered,
"so where there are none,
we create them."

But now
instead of second-hand accounts
of days in bed,
ill-fated relationships
and unaccountable weeping,
I read her own words.

And I am staggered,
inspired,
by her strength
and her insight,

and by how little
we can know of each other
until we are ready
to learn.

Not here
and not now.

Brothers,
let us stand together.
Sisters,
you can stay sitting.

Let us stand
united
by our inability
to stay out in the sun
too long.

In fact,
would someone mind
erecting a gazebo
for us to stand united
underneath?

Thank you.

Brothers,
having proven
that we cannot demonstrate
our superiority
through sport,
rhetoric,
mathematics,
music,
drama,
art,
science,
business acumen
or military might

Let us instead
prove it beyond all doubt
by gathering in groups
and chanting slogans.

Flags are good, too.
Dagnab it,
just look at the way
we can wave those flags.

If that
doesn't qualify us
as the Master Race,
then I don't know what will.

And thus anointed,
let us expunge the world
of miscegenation.
Let us cleanse public radio
of anything other
than Bavarian folk music.
Let us revel
in boiled beef
and wheat-based foods.
Let us return
the mineral wealth of the world
to the tarnished, coloured nations
from whence it came.

Let us reject
foreign mythologies
apart from that one
about Jesus
obviously.

Let us all return
to the country, town,
street
and house
of our birth.

History is with us, brothers.
If there's one thing
it teaches us
it's that nothing should ever change
and empires
never fall.

Sieg heil!

Icy dock
bump and knock
one gull huddles
on a cold black rock

frozen feet
driving sleet
tethered by the weather
like the landed fleet

gull spreads wings
north wind sings
rumble and a mumble
as the pub door swings

step inside
drink is tried
filling up and spilling
like the storm-surge tide

howl and din
locks you in
ice goes slicing
through your winter skin

knock them down
drink and drown
bleezin empty season
in a seaside town

Like a rabbit from a hat
Like a bouquet from a sleeve
You appear, and just like that
You pull poetry from me.