spoken word

My Invisible Friend Is An Insomniac – Translated!

My Invisible Friend Is An Insomniac – Translated!

An amazing gentleman and friend from over-the-sea very kindly translated ‘My Invisible Friend Is An Insomniac’ into Spanish. You can read it at the link below. You should also check the rest of his blog, there is some beautiful wordsmithing there! Thank you Mauricio González Álvarez!

Listening To A Street’s Voicebox

Standing attention to the sound of first shouts
post dance floor, I listened with my stabiliser wings
clipped by taxi rank breath of engines, a howl
in the concrete cube alley outside Revolution
where a punch drunk fist blew echo holes
in the throat throat throat…
It turned the whole street into a procession
with blue light sirens and kebabs spilled,
neon vomit on the high heeled
‘Oh no,’ flamingos, pencilled into their skirts,
holding onto their fannies with their clutch bags,
squawking with tiptoes around the rugby kit mobs
oofing the championship brawl of the curb,
oof oof to each fist landed, the proper Reading lad
beating a Northerner for looking at him funny,
at least, that’s what he thinks he said,
in testimony as the law enforcing, luminous jackets pile
batons on his boxer brains, echoes his claims
that he’s not a racist, he just hates Northeners
and I recognise his bloody eyebrows from school
and his mouthy grit stained lips, spitting curses
and baseball bats at the officers, who monotone
their radio, cancelling backup, checking in the arrest,
test, test, they boom the mic, as a band starts in a bar
down the road, swooping the echo attention
of the crowd massing to a shout fight,
where a guys is almost killed for his accent
by someone I used to break juice boxes with
and watched him hiss at pupils, teachers,
without ever trying to stop him.

Sign Of My Times

I see the compulsive man, picking up dead leaves

On his path home, placing them in sun beaten carrier bags

It must take him four and a half hours to get home,

I ask him if he needs a hand and he says

Autumn is coming, then shuffles up the street .

 

It’s the first of March, my birthday, I’m resolving to kick my habit

of tooth rot and parrot talk, and I’m welcoming the spring.

I contemplate celebrating by becoming a crack dealer

Photocopying my buttocks

And fly posting the university walls

But it’s hard being anonymous here

So we use facepaint and dance instead.

 

A disco outing after developing a cocktail called Sex

I give my first speech and forget to thank my parents,

The party in my flat cheer anyway and bundle my bed

For a count of 15, raise their glasses and march out the door

Clinking to ring of fire, beer pong anthems.

 

We’re at 80s flirt, loose legs limp on the neon juice,

Beat over the face with dubstep and handbags

I shake them off tell them I’m with wonderwoman

Thundercat strut in my tights to New Order,

Downing Aftershock, meek chemical peel burn

In my throat, pure fluoride,

Need to spit, to head home for the dentist

or a bathroom floor, a porcelain bowl.

On exit, we’re questioned by two bowling pin bouncers,

I high five one’s face and stamp out the fire at the other’s feet

Shrieking like the scared lion I am painted to be.

Wonder woman apologises for me, moaning ‘Lion-O,’

Ready to escort me home.

 

Catching brain freeze from drinking too much air

My feet are blood balloons trussed up in leather

Too tired I start rolling up the hill on the pavement

That is hiding under a blanket of dead leaves,

We reach the porch,

where two guys shake cum and vomit out of a bed sheet

Into 2.10 AM wind, chatting about chicken kebab

And how tight Stacey is. ‘Are you going to be single for tour

Full on tonguing Spanish heart and whores?’

I shrug the sign of my times and tut at their language,

Kick leaves off heels at the door, held up by my caped saviour

Eager to hide in my cupboard that believes it’s a bedroom.

Inside, I get called a racist by post-it notes

pinned to a corkboard for poetry

tell myself to be calm and deliver slow.

Drink the chalk water, talk to the toaster

For spring loaded conversation,

Hear the after midnight row, upturned beds and wall pummels

Little naked fists, wrist caught and kissed

That love hate relationship knuckle imprints my cheekbones

 

They know I’m home when they hear my post night out stream

My head hits the ceiling, feet land after a minute, collapse on

My lover wonderwoman, who starts wiping the makeup and tears from

My battered skull, picking dead leaves from my locks

Telling me I’m beautiful,

while I try to articulate why I respect women.

She shushes me with a hand on the back of my neck

I purr and cry at the excess love in my veins, the sign of the times

Fear of autumn coming, thankful for the superheroes

We both painted ourselves to be, both mismatched

But resting in the same, spring time tree,

Two cats in no need of firefighters.

 

Beep

Beep…Beep…Beep…Beep…Beep…Beep

Laying on a bed cradling your first born stab wound,

You’re left looking like a heart attack

after you’ve stepped past the exact

point of standing against the common ground

that is the earth held on the tip of a knife point,

so concerned with shoving a statement in your chest

like vacuous motivation is what you need

when you’re trying to Beep… past the radars

of those expecting things from you. Great things.

High expectations for long disappointments.

All it takes is the foot placed wrong

and you’re in Monitor City Beep… Beep…

Every single word and beat and feeling

Registered, processed, jerked with an arthritic

lie detector arm. You’ve got the wrong guy.

I’m a victim, believe me, I have no voice.

I’m sorry, is that my heart so truthfully scripted there?

It looks like a child’s fridge drawing, scribbles of nonsense

scored with decaying crayon …Beep…

It would just be nice to say things without interruption …Beep…

Definitely a forgery… Beep… Last time I fisted a …Beep…

See I can’t even complete the sentence.

The wires in my skin are trying to fix the pump within

and all its redeemed with is a Beep… Beep…

what I might say next is free from the chest,

for a thought provoked from the bottom

of the barrel headed minds that so frequently roll around here.

Beep… I never used to talk like this. I feel as though I’m in code

…Beep… Encoded by the …Beep… So making sense

while I lay here might be the …Beep… ends of all reasonable

discourse from a tired soul. News is on.

 

*Suspects questioned today in a lyrical hit and run enacted

last night on rappers Blatently Overated and Uncreative.

They were riddled with assumptions and deaf ears,

leaving them in quite a shock after their lyrics

had been stolen. They are both trying to recover their voices

and are glad to have put one of the assailants in hospital…*

 

You can only make a living from what has been done before.

Some people are more literal about this than others.

I could question the morals at hand here,

while I’m dying on the suspension bridge of …Beep…

They still have their voices and words revolving

around the corporate music media, instead of being locked in

to a tape recorder, a dying artist monologuing to a transcript

that will make it no ears or minds or …Beep…

Come inside me. Close your eyes. See what I pretend to see.

Here is the vast plain of creativity I have here,

locked under eyelids and blood vessels and bones broken

as a milk bottle left carelessly in the wind. It falls to smash

and out blossoms the word ‘WHITE’, which can be assumed

stands for canvas or convex or concave, a shape at the very least,

of something you can mould beyond all comprehension.

Or simply let disappear, here, in the back garden,

where Dad used to cut the grass and now the lawnmower sits

next to Mum’s fabric sunning chair, shredded by hails stones,

with grass grown all around it and the Spring weather

has bounced off again, so all it does is rain to rust its metal.

You roll around as a dog and wonder if you were a cat,

the moon would be the most enticing bowl of milk

but instead you are …Beep… relaxing, coming to terms

with the fact you will never mould yourself into something

that will excel as high as the moon …Beep… but it’s enough

to want to create the journey, to pull from yourself,

lying on the ground, the ideas of ladders or spaceships

beaming down and pulling you up from your daily dog/cat duties,

to reach something as unimportant but beautiful as space,

time takes nothing from you, just a day dream daze

for half a day and there you are, laying in thin air, despite the …Beep…

that stops your free thought …Beep… Dad forgives you for not mowing.

Mum has fresh lemonade, despite the cold … Beep…

Nurse puts a sponge in my chest cavity and soaks up some blood.

It tickles, too much. Hahaha stop it you cheeky …Beep…

I don’t feel like waking up just yet. I’ve got too many

restrictions waking up for …Beep… sake. Stop it, this is

…Beep… of the highest… Beep… Let me see my mother

…Beep… for another …Beep… I’ll tell you everything

…Beep… I was the one stabbed … Beep… Beep…

For my …Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep…