izzy

I want to make noises like lightsabers and laser guns and fast cars
I want to just yell nice things into the abyss of the internet like
HELLO!
YOU LOOK GREAT TODAY
CHECK OUT THIS SUN, POWERING LIFE ON EARTH
and
WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP
as some kind of antidote

I don’t want to be from a place where we lock people up indefinitely
just for wanting to not be afraid every day, for not wanting to be dead
I want to be able to meet the Prime Minister and shake their hand
and say ‘it’s an honour to meet you’ or something and mean it
because it’s sad that this is what we are making,
that the most insulting way to call someone racist in France right now
is to call them ‘Tony Abbott’

I will try to watch people read poetry like smashing bricks on faces and just feel proud of them
for trying to mould the inadequacy of language into the shape of their feelings
I will try to watch and feel hope
and then I will yell, ‘IT’S OK. it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok. you don’t have to be anyone else.
you don’t have to rhyme or say ‘betwixt thine thighs’ or ‘oh my heart’
I FEEL YOU. just tell it to me straight.

this could be a place where having a body that is anything other than
white, male and able is still seen as an incredible thing, not an invitation
to ridicule or danger or trauma but actually just a party –
our bodies are parties, all of them buzzing, because we are here,
we are all alive together at the same time

*

sarah

The gallery is richly scented, light
And full of woody opulence and pomp
And every surface throngs with flesh, their eyes
Burn hollow lines like lace across the rooms
Just close your eyes, allow yourself to hear
The thousand chattered voices from the walls
The men with cedar voices, honey-hued
The women purring insubstantial words
The cherubs, held aloft by whispered wings
And then, between the murmuring and song
The shuffling of horse-hooves over stone
The whickering and barrel-chested breath
The twitching bulbs of muscle roped with veins
Now, with your nostrils full of hay and hair
And painted stallions dancing in your eyes,
Come see the deathly horror that awaits
Beneath this vaulting, hallowed plaster roof
Four iron hooves are rope-lashed, lifted high
Their pitchy heft made dumb without the earth
Two mighty horse-hides, torn and raised aloft
Four thousand pounds of wasted, rotted meat
Gone to the dogs, but here, their glossy cloaks
Still cling to legs whose fetlocks graze the sky
And headless, heartless, lifeless in the air
These massive skins, whose coats once sweated life
Seem further dead than all the wasted world.

*