Campfires

Mixing my metaphors,
mixing my drinks,
mixing my words up
and catching a glimpse
of a future more hopeful,
a welcome reminder
that the world we inhabit
it stronger and kinder
thanks to the campfires
where stories are shared,
thanks to the spaces
where souls can be bared.

Artists and architects,
squatters and owners,
activists, pacifists,
lenders and donors,
ecological lovers,
political believers,
entrepreneurial
shapers and weavers,
midwives and farmers,
brewers and bakers,
radical teachers and
movers and shakers.

Erasing the borders
that stopped our advance,
closing the chasms
across which we dance,
eroding all barriers,
corroding all fears,
creating new kinship,
and raising great cheers;
embracing our difference
without any fuss,
ensuring that “us and them”
grows into “us”

 

This piece sums up much of my work and much of 2017 for me – a year that centred on Manchester Street Poem, a performed installation co-created with Underworld as part of Manchester International Festival. MSP also lives on as a website – a living digital history of homelessness in the city of Manchester – and a legacy project that will hopefully result in future iterations of the work. There’s an excellent 12 min film about the project at the top of the website:

http://manchesterstreetpoem.com/
http://www.underworldlive.com/

Manchester Street Poem managed to encapsulate the best elements of several personal passions in one piece of work: the intersection between the homelessness sector and the arts; genuinely co-produced work; a focus on people and their stories; questioning and redefining what art is for; breaking down barriers in our society and bringing people together; closing the gap between head and heart; and integrating solutions to complex problems via the arts. 

Sacrifice

Giving only to ourselves,
we receive nothing.
Building only for ourselves,
we create nothing.
Living only for ourselves,
we belong to nothing.
Dying only for ourselves,
we live alone.

The Essence of humanity
cannot be spoken,
only enacted in forging
community:
love articulated by
sacrifice,
to something greater than
the individual.

 

Reading Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/57079/flight-to-arras/

Cronies

Hand in pocket, old boys faction,
scratching backs in chain reaction:
leather armchairs, schmoozing dinners,
always backing certain winners.
Around this mob the city grows,
ever upward, towering shows
of steel splendour, gleaming glass
no more room for trees or grass
or low-rise housing, old-style pubs,
working families, social clubs,
diversity of class or craft,
no more good old-fashioned graft,
and listen to that rousing cheer:
“No more social housing here!”

The old boys glory in their smarts
with bursting egos, vacant hearts,
while underneath their monuments
the legacy of soaring rents:
men and women, old and young,
pushed from off the bottom rung,
on the streets and on their arse,
living signs of civic farce,
and worst of all invisible
to those who find it risible
that folk could end up in this plight
– lacking shelter day and night –
without it being their own doing:
some addiction they’re pursuing,
or crime, or wanting stuff for nowt,
no wonder they’ve all been chucked out!

This tide of human misery
resulting from such frippery
is rising like a sentient ocean,
causing ripples of commotion
stemming from its epicenter –
surprise, surprise, the city centre!
The old boys can’t contain their anger;
all this mess disturbs their languor!
Drinking, drugs and people begging,
piles of food waste, heaps of bedding,
human excrement and spice,
there seems to be a pretty price
to pay for treating folk like scum
and all the while just acting dumb
like none of this has any link
to what you’ve done or how you think:

Obsession with development,
declaring that you always meant
to make sure every resident
was nurtured by your precedent.
All this whitewash now unmasked
by the question never asked:
what happens if our only object
is investment in the project
of booming economic progress
all delivered through the process
of inviting corporations
to come without the regulations
that would make for social justice –
leadership with actual substance?

Well here’s your answer, bold as brass:
you’ve gone and made an underclass,
people so debilitated
by the context you’ve created
as to become a social crisis
teaching us just what the price is
for making all these sacrifices
to your egos’ weighty vices.