Heads, Shoulders, Knees & Toes
Don’t grope people at punk shows
Even if the music’s really good
Even if you think you should
Don’t grope people at punk shows!
 
If they haven’t asked, don’t do it
If they haven’t said yes, don’t move it
If they haven’t given explicit, coherent consent…
Put it between your legs and go…
Heads, Shoulders, Knees & Toes!
 
If someone prefers the pronouns ‘they and them’
They have a right to exist and be self-expressing
They have a right be themselves without your blessing
And if you don’t know what pronouns are,
Get a dictionary and you’ll know…
Heads, Shoulders, Knees & Toes!
 
If someone says they’re a man or a woman
Or happily ambiguous
Don’t ask them if they’d had the op
Or what they keep between their legs
And if someone wears a skirt, or socks, or a piercing
Or has a tattoo or a funny looking earring
You’ve got no right to call them hooker or ho…
Heads, Shoulders, Knees & Toes!
 
And if someone’s in a wheelchair
Don’t ask them what went wrong
And if someone’s not white
Don’t ask them where they’re from
Don’t mansplain
Or say the word Meninist
Because your tiny mind
Can’t understand feminists
The world’s moving forward and you’re too slow…
Heads, Shoulders, Knees & Toes!
 
And if you still don’t understand…
Here’s a hundred anti-fascists with two hundred ready hands
Because the world no longer bows down to your straight and narrow plans
We are all minorities, we are all queer, we are all women and trans
We are all disabled and vegetarian
we are everything that you are scared of
We are here, and we will not disappear, we’re the broken toys at the back of the shelf
We are finally together and we are proud to be ourselves
So keep your Heads, Shoulders, Knees & Toes
To yourself

Cock duster, germ catcher,
Lip Snatcher.

Chin neighbour, non shaver,
Friend of my nose.

Inspired by Flanders and Stalin
My face-based furry darling.

You've made me hirsute and crinigerous
Bewhiskered and pilose
But now the time has come for me
To stop your bristly growth

Before we start, let me say
It's not you, it's me
We've drifted apart and now today
We've got to break free,
Spend some time apart.
Maybe you should see other faces
And I could try a beard, or inappropriately long ear hair.

I love you, and i'm proud of myself
For being pubescent enough
To grow facial hair at the age of 24
But you itch, and I think you were the cause of that cold.
My furry little friend alas,
Together we will not grow old

And mainly, I work with children and your presence has caused some upset.
So please don't make this harder than it has to be
I'm already filled with 'stache-based regret.

Goodbye for now my bristle baton
I hope that you will rest in more than pieces
Of shaving residue, blowing gently in the breeze 
On my laminate floor.

Goodbye my noble snot mop,
My very own mouth merkin
I'll remember fondly these weeks you've truly served me.

I hope there's a heaven for moustaches
Where it rains wax
And the sound of the electric shaver
Is but a distant memory.
But, for now everytime I think of you
I'll gaze desolately
At your cousins - the lowly armpit hairs.
And softly, sadly,
Touch my lip.
Wishing you were there.

Take me to that middle aisle
Babe I know it'll make you smile
German socks and paddling pools
Polo Shirts and Power Tools
Darling they have got it all
​I'm just your Lidl Lovin' Fool

If you want to wear high heels,
Then that's your perogative
- Not a stage direction
For some dickhead to be so damn derogative

Yeah it might make you taller than the average straight, white man
But you've fought to get here, you've pushed with pain through your plans
- Heels down, head up, be proud
Whatever your identity, love yourself and be loud
Trans, Non-Binary, or relying on machines
Or the best damn drag queen i've ever seen
- Walk, Roll, Sashay away
In whatever shoes make you feel ok

Own those high heels, they are not your achilles
They can make you move like Jackson in Thriller
And you can make that feeling go right f**king through you

Because you are the only person who has the right
(not any street creep)
To have an opinion on what you wear on your feet.
So Totter proud, you high-heeled hyrdas
You are mythical creatures worthy of your own smile

So live, love dance
Run around in your pants
Kiss, kick kill
In those high high heels
There's no glass floor you can't shatter.
Wear whatever you want, because that's all that matters.

There’s no word more middle class than ‘FLABBERGASTED’
But it’s not a word I heard many tongues say
During my teenage years,
Spent in a semi-detached at the back of a council estate.
We didn’t have that vocabulary, too busy being chip butty battered and bruised…
But if we did, this is how it would’ve been used…
 
Remember that time we camped out in the woods?
Clothed in tracksuits like polyester gypsies
Getting tipsy on shit cider,
Pituitary punks chewing cheap skunk,
Getting higher and higher
When that crack head came and set our tent on fire
We were… FLABBERGASTED
 
Or that day at my mate’s
Playing mind-bending gut-wrenching games on a clapped out X-Box 360
Twenty rounds of Tekken in the time when his dad was out at the pub, that slim slice of safety
Between the fatherly thumps that happened so routinely…
His mum was upstairs having a wee
When the police banged on the battered back door, no need for a key
Tipped off about the speed she kept in the cupboard
Next to the Kellog Crunchies.
The only way she saved herself from financial harm,
With a husband propped up every day at the bar.
That was nasty. We were… FLABBERGASTED
 
Or when my second hand bike got nicked, twice in one night.
They came to that house party with a hedgehog they’d found by the A35
Drop kicked that mal-prepared mammal like a spiky bag of shite
And when we tried to stop ‘em? Started a fight,
Fists flew to my chin
Then they tipped over your wheelie bin
Sweet and sour skin heads lighting fags and laughing.
We were… FLABBERGASTED
 
And then… That time we ran past that flat filled with wrong’uns
The football was on and… We said their team was shit.
So they came out, didn’t catch me but kicked your fucking head in.
You were too unconscious to feel hurt, splinters of teeth scattered by the kerb.
And the council house next door to them, home to an old man that they called a paedophile when probably he just had special needs and a lonely life.
Front door always open, wafting smells of warfarin and stale wee,
Hadn’t washed in weeks ‘cos they’d turned off his water,
His only oasis, His liquid catharsis.
He died that month, no one found him for weeks that poor bastard.
We were… FLABBERGASTED
 
But back to you, madam.
Standing in the queue for an expensive drink at a John Cooper Clarke gig.
Through off-white teeth you said you were ‘FLABBERGASTED’
At that work do BBQ when your colleague Miranda the Business Manager
Let her kids wear clashing shades of beige trousers. Sounds like shocking stuff.
I’m not surprised that after a week of struggling to survive such events,
You’re here for some working man’s poetry - money well spent.
And I hope that in between your rose-scented bathwater laughter, Middle class sniggers snaking up to the rafters,
That your Marks & Spencer sensibilities Aren’t too shook.
That when you hear poems about poor people, piss artists and abusive partners,
You aren’t left feeling too… FLABBERGASTED

In an attempt to be honest, I wanted to say
That i’m not feeling so great, pretty far from Adonis
No sixpack, no muscles;
just a four pack of cheap beer from Brussels.
It’s moments like this that I don’t feel so lucid
But it’s somehow important that I try to be truthful
Mental health is not just some pigeonhole for the unfortunate
Just like pigeonshit it can change you to something you thought you weren’t
Whether good, bad or in between
It’s something we all experience; and it’s somewhere I’ve been
It’s normal to feel overworked or stressed
It’s normal not to want to get dressed
It’s normal to feel like you’re one in 8 billion
That if you weren’t here, that would be nothing significant
And sadly it’s normal not to talk about it or cry
To take to our screens creating parallel lives
And to be honest, there’s no easy solution
I’ve tried everything from athletics to drug-based pollution
But what I do believe is that there’s strength in numbers
That if we work together we decide when our time’s up
That if I can tell even one person that I feel like shit
And my whole being is hurting
Then at least I’ve tried, and when it comes back around
I can be the one to pick you up from the ground
Get a coffee, a beer
Another hole in your ear
Get a brand new pet, read a book about Tibet
Do whatever you need, even if it's doing nothing instead
Because I promise you more than anything in my broken head
From my brain to my balls
That you are never, never
n e v e r
Better off 
Not here at all.

I was in the English Riviera, round the back of River Island
Sidling through the alleyways where men and women hide
And one thing that I saw, I swore
I’d try to write about…
A man, discrete on concrete space
Next to someone’s storage waste
These black wheeled wonders in a refuse shed
Next to a human with no roof over his head.
What kind of world am I living in
When a person’s worth less than a wheelie bin?
They say that if you sold a body, weight by weight and bit by bit
It would be worth around 100 quid.
But somewhere along the line
We’ve forgotten the value of human heat and intelligent minds.
The homeless man who gives the dog his last warm chip
Or the woman on benefits that hands back a wallet when somebody’s dropped it.
And I know that it seems we can’t stop shoving rubbish inside us
Treating ourselves like landfill ‘til the whole world despises us.
But the last time I looked, a man’s worth more than a bin
Every single one of us knows where we’ve been
Knows we have the right to be safe and be clean.
Knows we deserve safety, respect and motivation.
To live in a compassionate, civilised nation.
So next time you jump on a bandwagon
Of callous callouts, just imagine;
That could be you with a little less luck
That could be you if you’d come unstuck.
Three paychecks and some bad decisions,
That’s all it takes to lose a little vision, so consider.
Next time you walk past someone who’s made some mistakes
Don’t think about whether they’re homeless or fake
Sit down, lend a hand, offer your ear.
When you do that you realise
There’s much more to hear.
 
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The year is 1969
Your eyes are stars, your arms are strong
I wish you were around me neil, we’ve been in orbit for too long
You’re my lovely lunar crater
Neil I think that you’re the greatest!
There’s nowhere I would rather sit
Than next to your cockpit.
You’re my one space odyssey
I wish that you and me could be reunited soon
But I’ll just sit here waiting for my man to get back from the moon.
I know that you don’t love me back! I know that you’re not into that!
And NASA said we’re not allowed
But metaphorically and literally
My head is in the clouds.
I’m your lonely rocket ship, never getting nearer
This atmosphere is killing, I’m sure you understand.
They say it’s one small step for man
One giant leap for all mankind
But I wish you’d take a step to me
And put your spaceman hands in mine.
 

​I went swimming the other day / and a fascist was getting changed
I tried not to listen to what I knew wasn’t true
As he got out of his speedos on the far right of the room
He said he wants to get rid of anyone who’s not quite white
Although he did enjoy his curry last night
He said he doesn’t hate them, just wants ‘em to stop stealing his job
Let him get back to his ham sandwiches and tiny nob
I could hear him talking about Nationalist Power
As he washed his bald head in the dirty shower
He went on, and on, and on
With his vitriolic bollocks, I don’t even know how
The whole time wiping his arse with a union jack towel
I could see last night’s curry, half digested in flecks on the flag
As he rolled it up in his sporty little bag, I could still smell the stink.
And I thought: ‘Next time you go swimming Dave, I hope you sink’