A poem for an absent friend.

Cathy...
You were a mother to all of us mongrels
You were always right
And we were the wrong'uns

We've grown up now, supposedly
No more nights hunched over the toilet seat
But I wish you were still here
To take the piss out of me

When we were 16,
Filled with concrete and cheap ketamine
You were there.
When we burnt that tent in the woods,
You turned up the next morning
Always doing what you could

And I hope that heaven has your cherry brandy
And they know just how you like to pour it
I would've gone and got you some
But you left without warning.

Your final curtain call has come too soon,
So we'll get pissed down here,
And make a toast to you.

​I eat plastic tasting pasta
From a Plastic pot
I eat sweets from plastic bags
Until my teeth rot
And when they do I’ll get some more
And they’ll be made from…
Plastic
 
PLASTIC, PLASTIC - IT’S FANTASTIC
I’M A PLASTIC ENTHUSIASTIC
IT’S TRULY THE ONLY SOUND SOLUTION
SO JOIN THE PETRO-CHEMICAL REVOLUTION
 
I watch plastic looking people
On a plastic TV
When I’m bored with my body
I get plastic surgery
I wear the very best polyester pants
And socks made from elastic
 
PLASTIC, PLASTIC - IT’S FANTASTIC
I’M A PLASTIC ENTHUSIASTIC
IT’S TRULY THE ONLY SOUND SOLUTION
SO JOIN THE PETRO-CHEMICAL REVOLUTION
 
When I have a baby,
It will play with plastic food
And I’ll coat it in plastic
So it is never nude
I keep my food in a plastic fridge
And I hope that you do too
My favourite instrument is a plastic didgeridoo
 
PLASTIC, PLASTIC - IT’S FANTASTIC
I’M A PLASTIC ENTHUSIASTIC
IT’S TRULY THE ONLY SOUND SOLUTION
SO JOIN THE PETRO-CHEMICAL REVOLUTION
 
I’M ABOUT TO GET ECCLESASTIC -
I WISH THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD WAS MADE FROM PLASTIC…
 
Plastic house, plastic spouse
Plastic mum with a plastic bum
Plastic chair, Plastic hair
I love plastic I don’t care
Plastic fish and plastic chips
I’ll kiss you with my plastic lips
Plastic fun and plastic friends
Plastic never ever ever ever
Ever ever ends

​Home.
A town called Torquay.
The English Riviera,
A place where even the mums will scare ya.
The Riv.
Torbaydos
A place where the local delicacy is a packet of space raiders.
Birthplace of Agatha Christie
And I mean no disrespect
But a 100 year old crime writer
Wasn’t really a role model for 16 year old me.
 
Inspiration for Fawlty Towers,
A town filled with heinous Hotels
A town that was ours.
Local attractions include Living Coasts,
Which is like a zoo where the animals are damper
A town where the most popular past time is getting wankered.
Where the old men snort grey phlegm into ragged handkerchiefs
And the young men don’t cry when they bleed.
 
It’s a place where spice prevails
And I don’t mean paprika.
That synthetic cannabinoid
Smoked by spice girls and boys
To alleviate the pain of their life stories
In a town run by hoteliers and Tories.
 
We’ve got a model village
It’s a place where, for once you can feel big.
 
The Sex Pistols visited in 1976
And they left early.
When a town’s so abysmal
That it out-punks the Pistols
What are we supposed to think?
Fists and chips in cones
Cocaine piss and Methadrone
A football team that always loses
A thousand wives with unexplained bruises.
This town is proud to be
The home of W.K.D.
With unemployment and diseases
Higher of the rest of the region.
At least we’re good at something.
 
A town calling out for some kind of saviour
And that is probably not Toff from Made In Chelsea
A town called Torbaydos
Where even the seagulls are lazy
A place that’s losing its public healthcare
But that’s ok, it’s the English Riviera
A town called Torquay
Where I feel alone
A town called Torquay
That I call my home.

I have never eaten a kiwi
Because, you see, I am allergic
To those hairy little miscreants
It’s fantastic, anaphylactic
My kryptonite… Is a kiwi
Those testicular spheres of mischief.
 
Do they taste like their citrus sisters,
Tangerines divine?
Or more like their jealous brothers
The limes?
Are they just grapes with fur like an ape that’s covered in mould
Or do they taste like their Avian namesake
Are they just chickens of the fruit bowl?
 
One thing I do know, though
Is that if I ever have to kill myself
If the depression gets too much
Or I join MI5 and a mission’s messed up
I would do so with a kiwi.
Squeeze its juice to my mouth from my hand
Wait for my face and my throat to expand
Roll around gurgling, a bloated harlequin
They’d try to save me with adrenaline
But it would be too late.
 
And although it wouldn’t be very dignified
Dying with a puddle of fruit juice by my side
At least the whole world would remember me
And the way I died
On the day that I committed
Kiwi Suicide.

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.