Here’s a poem I wrote sitting on a dirty table at a GAILS, drinking a £4 coffee that tasted like nothing.

The park I played in
Sees the traffic of youth
Forever,

The roundabout spins 
Against the clock
Revolving youth
Stay young forever
At least
According to the sky.

Children throw their bodies
Down metal slides.
If their teeth fall out
They will still grow back.

Telephone Masts make noise 
At night. 

I used to be blonde, 
Smoke before 9AM,
Keep a broken heart
Like a bird 
In the cage
Of my ribs.

I could tell you:

That the ocean always changes
And therefore never changes,

Categories are null,

I dream
About outer space
A lot, 
I dream about a
Golden path in
A winter's forest
That I do not
Walk down,

Dirt paths
Do not scrape you
How tarmac does.

I used to count down the days
To summer.
Now, I scatter across the unmade bed
Searching for remnants of poetry
In the corners of my brain 
As the country burns, 
Gasping
For
Rain. 

I could tell you 
I sound like my mother 
When I sing, 
But that is a secret. 

Evyn Gensurowsky’s costumes for Agostina Cerullo's short film “Unmarked Ground” play with timelessness. Raffia is the central fibre, a natural, malleable straw. The garments meet us in a distant place. They are unmistakably made by modern hands, with intricate corset-silhouettes and asymmetrical, open-back cut outs that require not just skill but education to manifest. Yet the ancient practice of straw weaving is given new life. Old shakes hands with new.

The garments extend beyond the body, supporting the foundations of the film. Cerullo states that the project “examines what it means to live without a fixed sense of belonging in a time where movement, migration, and displacement are increasingly common.” Gensurowsky embodies this concept by giving the garments un-fixed bounds; sleeves become straw that hands reach through and the skirt is equally untethered, moving with the body as well as the wind. There is the sense that Gensurowsky allows the elements to work alongside her, sacrificing complete control and allowing the spirit to bleed into the art with this design choice. With a structured high neck, there is something of Joan of Arc in the look; a fitting nod to the sacred-anarchic feminine, someone beyond the bounds of structured society, someone dedicated to movement. The armour-esque bodice also visually communicates the sense of safety that one can create within themselves when the outer-world is not supportive. It is a costume made for a strong character, someone with divine purpose.

The character Ulrica is a fortune teller, a person deeply embedded in the old world, capable of seeing the invisible threads of time and space. Her costume is a tangible representation of this idea with overlapping circles and braids that appear and disappear, draw the eyes in and mesmerise the viewer. The costume provides the character with a substantial sense of self, that where self is an organic creature. Weaving is an ancient art both tangibly and emotionally. Stories are woven just as garments are. What are we but bodies and stories? Gensurowsky has created an extension of Ulrica, a mirror, an armour.

Check out more work on Evyn’s website here.

Insta: @egensurowsky

All photographs by Evyn unless stated otherwise.

I start my day with fingers twitching towards my phone. Before rational thinking kicks in, my bleary eyes are waking up inside the digital world of Instagram reels. The voices of countless strangers ring out into my bedroom, a place so recently quiet with the hum of sleep. I don’t know what I am about to see. I don’t seem to care. Videos of war flash before my eyes. A young person is crying into the camera, describing a homophobic attack after England lost the semi-final. Someone in their early thirties is filming the progress of their home renovation, an old Tudor building they lucked out with somehow. Dogs. Art. Poverty. Unemployment. Unemployment. Anti AI. Pro AI. AI. AI. AI.

I put it away, eventually. I notice hunger pangs in my stomach. I regret starting my day like this. I will do it again tomorrow. I make breakfast. I force myself to read my book. I end up on my phone again. I put it in the corner of my room. I pick up my book. I can’t stop thinking about my phone. I turn it off, put it in another room. I tell myself I can check it again at midday. I get up, dressed. I open my laptop. I fight the temptation to open Instagram on my browser.

Phone addiction is a serious issue. Meta recently settled over 1,000 lawsuits in the US from schools who sued the tech giant for “fuelling a mental health crisis in children.” (The Guardian). The case is closed, though the terms of settlement are undisclosed. More recently, they’ve come under fire for using AI tools to lay off employees who took protected time off for disability related reasons or maternity leave. (The Guardian.) Meta is a prejudiced company promoting capitalism over humanitarianism.

UK teenagers spend more time on social media than they do in school. According to Gov.uk, teens (13-14) spend four hours per day on social media alone, not including gaming, TV or any other screen-related activities. I did the maths. (Teens are in school for around 7 hours per day, 5 days a week, for 39 weeks out of the year which totals to 1365 hours or 56.9 days per year. Teens spend around 4 hours on social media every single day - with no weekend breaks or school holidays away from it. That’s 4 hours per day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks out of the year. This totals to 1456 hours or 60.7 days every year.) Teenagers are spending around two months of their years on social media. Adults aren’t much better, averaging between two and four hours with Gen Z adults clocking the same average screen time as teens.

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Why is this a problem? While there are benefits to social media, there are downfalls, too.

Social media is a powerful painkiller with potent dissociative qualities that allow us to spend hours at a time away from the discomfort of our body and mind. We enter a trancelike state where time moves very fast and hours of our days are eaten up watching videos of people we don’t know. The majority of these videos are not purposefully created, artfully executed and then screened in front of a board of intentionally-employed adults who deem the content suitable for a certain age range. These videos are not shown in contained spaces, ensuring that audiences are mature enough to receive the information healthily. While there is an effort being made to monitor content for teens, FYPs are essentially un-contained spaces where information flies freely unshaped by any structure whatsoever.

Or, so it seems. FYPs are wild places but the algorithm does promote some content over others. It’s really hard to pull genuine statistics on this because Meta doesn’t share this info freely but Meta is often accused of suppressing left-leaning content. For years, Meta has suppressed Palestinian voices. Voices that talk out on the genocide are regularly shadow banned while the algorithm boosts posts made by white people promoting products. Check this website out for more info. It’s a subtle and sinister trope. Meta quietly silences the voices they don’t want us to hear while elevating the voices they deem important. Another perfect example is the colonisation of yoga. Social media algorithms favour workout-wear sales and the pedestalization of thin white people over the sacred, true healing that real yoga actually promotes. Ancient Indians developed a slow, meditative practice to promote unity and self-realisation with harmony at the heart. This is not something that can be achieved during a 30-day-challenge. The algorithm furthers colonisation, self-isolation, eurocentric beauty standards, patriarchal ideals and right-wing politics. It is not a neutral space, though the lawlessness and seeming randomness of it makes it seem as though it is. It’s weaponised incompetence.

Convenience culture is causing a decline in third spaces. We can get whatever food we want delivered to our door, we can see any movie we want at the click of a button, we can order all the clothes we like and receive them the next day. Shopping centres feel more like abandoned towns these days. Restaurants are seeing more and more take-out orders coming in. Pubs and grassroots gig venues are dropping like flies. The list goes on. We have everything we need now and we don’t need to face the weather to get it anymore. We’ve even restructured the nature of friendship. Rather than dropping by each other’s houses or calling your mates on the phone, we look at pictures online put out for everyone to see. There’s no intimacy in this. You are seeing the same content that their ex, their boss, their nan, their dog walker, and their colleague is seeing. This is passive, indirect, and soulless. Community is active, direct, and meaningful.

Without intentional time with our close friends, we are making casualties of ourselves. For example, we no longer receive news of personal tragedy within the confines of a caring community. I can remember the last time I was told tragic news in the same room as the person telling it to me. 2017. Since then, I’ve discovered all misfortune via a social media post, text message, voice note or - at best - a phone call. In each instance of this, I had to reach out to someone else and ask for in-person support. The person who supports me is out of context. They know the story of the event, not the event. It becomes my tragedy, not ours. I long to share misfortune. I long to be immediately held upon discovering disaster. I long to receive this type of news from someone who will factor in my surroundings, my context, my plans that day, my history. I want to hear news like this from a familiar person who will embrace me afterwards. I don’t want to read it in an Instagram post minutes before taking a driving test.

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It is elements of disconnection such as this that are seriously impacting our mental health and fostering an environment of deep, unknowing loneliness. There is so much to say on this that I could dedicate an entire essay to it, for now I will move on. The type of loneliness modern humans are experiencing is entirely new to our evolutionary timeline. Up until now, community was the bedrock of humanity, entirely necessary for survival. You are not insane for feeling gut-punched when you see pictures of your friends hanging out without you. Regardless as to why this has happened, whether or not you know the context, the human animal is reacting appropriately to social isolation.

“Loneliness Influencers” are feeding this lifestyle back into the Apps, romanticising the feeling the apps help to produce. Of course Meta is promoting this content. Loneliness is a powerful tool for the oppressive elite, the men building water glugging data centres and giving Sophia the robot more rights than the women it shares the streets with. These influencers are making a living out of loneliness, making it seem not just manageable but desirable. Yet they still participate in the parasocial dynamic of creator/user, still posting content into the world asking it to see them.

There are no revolutions without community. Loneliness may be engineered by the Zuckerbergs of the world, or it may just be a side-effect they’re preying on. Either way, we don’t have to stand for it. Media literacy is not taught in schools. I write this essay in response to that. The algorithm is sly, subtle and sinister. It is really important that we look at the landscape we are spending up to two months of the year in with full awareness.

I’m not saying we need to turn off the Apps. Instagram has helped me take huge steps towards understanding my ongoing mystery illness. Hailing from an artless suburb, Tumblr paved the way for me to become a musician. WhatsApp makes it easy to see my friends spontaneously. I am grateful for the positive attributes of social media but I am lucky to be aware of the negative ones. It’s really important that we keep our wits about us and become media literate so we can enjoy the benefits safely. Maybe some community driven tech legend wants to create an app more like the Instagram we signed up for in 2010. We have to oppose the negatives and demand better, more neutral algorithms. There are many ways the future can be brighter if we keep talking and believing in positive change.

Below, I will list some of the ways I am trying to maintain a healthy relationship with social media. Addiction is not easily overcome with boundaries but I am of the mindset that if I make the boundaries and break them and then make them again, I am taking charge of at least some of my time rather than none. I am biding my time, waiting for a healthier future and I truly believe it is on its way. Realistically, I maintain these boundaries for around 30% of the year. This is better than 0%.

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1. No screens in the bedroom (buy an alarm clock)

2. Get a burner. I bought a Nokia with a pay as you go sim from ASDA mobile (£4 a month and you can renew it every month whenever you like, no commitment). It has a small number of contacts in it and only a few people know the number. It allows me to take periods of time away from my smartphone but remain contactable in this world of constant communication.

3. Turn it off. When I am done with it, when there is no reason for me to need my phone for the next few hours, I turn it off. Things used to turn off. We used to power on our tech before using it. This is normal.

4. Use a mantra. Here are a few of mine and the mind-climates that they come from. I repeat these phrases to myself each time I reach for my phone and do not stop saying them until the feeling passes and I can move onto something else.

   1. “No one needs me and I need no one,” for days I am anxious that someone will need to contact me/I will need to contact someone in an emergency. I promise myself that it is very uncommon to need to know something within seconds of it occuring. Dire emergencies are rare. I cannot live my life anticipating them.

   2. “This will not save me,” for days when I am having bad mental health and my body twitches to my phone for support that is not there. If I need real support, I can reach out to a friend and ask them to call my Nokia if they can meet up, take part in one of the many simple grounding techniques at my disposable and, if it’s really bad, I will call a mental health support line from my burner (one of the few contacts saved). Scrolling reels will not save me. It just allows me to procrastinate the crisis.

   3. “There is nothing for me here,” for general days when I have a bad habit of doom scrolling.

5. Physically support yourself to stay away from your phone. We’ve all picked up our phone to set a timer and ended up on Instagram with our banana bread burning in the oven, haven’t we? So, buy a casio watch, an egg timer, etc.. I have a typewriter so I can still write in the way I am used to. I have lots of CDs, a walkman, cameras, clocks. I have poetry books, coffee table books and magazines so I can still engage in “short form content” without needing to commit to a whole chapter of a book. I write down good recipes and keep them in a scrapbook.

6. Have a no-phone day/afternoon/hour at least once a week. Go easy on yourself. It’s an addiction and it’s not silly to feel anxious when you first spend time away from your phone. Take it seriously. Don’t push yourself too far too fast. But also try. Put it down. Go for a walk without it. Prove to yourself that you’ll be okay without it. Be brave.

7. Don’t make excuses. Smartphones are easier and faster, yes, but if we have enough time to give up to two hours (at least) to scroll we all have enough time to write out a recipe. You won’t miss anything. I promise you that nothing will happen while you are gone. No message needs such a rapid response. Leaving something for a day or two is going to be okay. You won’t miss opportunities. The more you do this the more you see how long you can get away with it. On the off-chance that your one day off-phone a week is the one day you were offered a life-changing, last minute opportunity, you will live. Just as we can’t live our lives anticipating dire emergencies, we also can’t live our lives anticipating miracles.

8. Turn off notifications. I choose when I look at my phone. I am on Do Not Disturb mode 100% of the time with my nearests and dearest contacts set to still be able to reach me (a simple setting change on the iPhone.) I also don’t allow Instagram or any apps for that matter to send me notifications.

9. No Face ID. I switched off face ID so I can’t just open my phone by looking at it each time I see a notification.

10. “Scroll Phone”. This is something I want to share that I haven’t yet implemented. I saw someone post about having an old iphone with all the social media apps on it. It only connects to wifi and they only use it in a designated chair in their house.

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The Hare is a boastful creature. He is very fast and proud. Eager to show off his skills, he challenges all the animals to a race. The Hare has made it known that he is very, very fast. The animals say no. All but one, The Tortoise. There’s a general chitter chatter at this; how could The Tortoise, the slowest animal on the land, possibly beat The Hare? Why would he want to try? The Hare takes a moment to consider this race. With his nose in the air it is clear by the haughty expression on his face that to race The Tortoise feels futile to him. Nevertheless, he agrees. In a week’s time, they will race.

The Tortoise prepares himself with gentle training and rest. In a week’s time, all the animals are gathered round the raceground and the starter points his gun to the air and shoots. They are off. Naturally, The Hare bounds ahead, quickly out of sight. The Tortoise moves at his natural pace, with his eyes on the horizon, unbothered by the jeers of the crowd. When The Hare gets halfway, he turns around and cannot even see The Tortoise. He jumps up and down making silly noises and crude faces until the Tortoise appears, a faraway dot before him and he taunts,

“You’re so slow, I can take a rest here and still beat you!”

The Tortoise says nothing. The Hare takes off his little hat and lies against a tree stump, covering his face with it. He nods off and dozes in the sun. He dozes so deeply and for so long that the slow and quiet Tortoise catches up. He does not make a sound as he passes The Hare.

He keeps his eyes on the track and moments before reaching the finish line, The Hare wakes up. He sees The Tortoise seconds away from reaching the finish line and, though he is much too far away to catch up, he sprints at full pelt. It is in this state of quickness that he watches The Tortoise stroll over the finish line in silence. Slow and steady wins the race.

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Aesop’s Fable of The Hare and The Tortoise is in our minds from school days. We were all told this as children so we may learn that the world is to be taken at one’s own pace. What we may initially mistake as our shortcomings could actually be our gifts. This story is ancient, written during the times of Alexander the Great. It is now, though, that the fable is most needed.

I spent five days in the Cornish countryside with my friends. While in the woods, I noticed that many of my daily symptoms simply didn’t show up. For four years I’ve experienced disabling fatigue, chronic sinus issues and daily body pain (to name but a few symptoms). In the woods where alarm clocks were silenced and the rush of the cars morphed into the rush of the stream, my fatigue sunk behind the trees, my sinus’ opened and I smelled the sweet leaves as the dew lifted off into the sky where the burning sun turned it back into air and my body pain was gone by the first hour of rambling through the brush. Within a day of my return, my fatigue returned to me and I write this slumped over my laptop through the mist in my brain as the noise of the city and the buzzing of my phone stings me like a wasp.

I don’t know why I felt better in the woods. It wasn’t all perfect. I have a lot of fear inside me and the darkness of the forest is not for the faint hearted. I returned home covered in blisters from hog weed and sunburn on my back, grateful for streetlamps and running water. I was relieved to come home. Then home revealed itself to be more than just my sunny house and the arms of my love but also the sirens, WhatsApp messages and the weight of my joblessness. In the woods, I was a Tortoise amongst Tortoises. In the city I am a Tortoise amongst not just Hares, but Lions and Jaguars and Horses. I don’t know how these animals feel inside. I just know that I move slower than them and I need more time to move about the world.

When I was young, I worked in a golf club in Tonbridge (the weird, scrappy cousin of Royal Tunbridge Wells.) As a late diagnosed autistic, we didn’t know that when I was sobbing on the floor of my parents house, white knuckled and clinging to the banister, begging them to let me call into work sick, that I wasn’t just “being a teenager” but having an autistic meltdown. To be fair, it was a pretty horrendous job. I worked all winter in a room with PVC curtains for doors. I hovered over the toastie machine, watching the bacon fat drip into the grease tray, trying to receive some warmth from it. I spent most of my shifts hiding around the back from my boss who, ten or so years older than me, would make crude hand gestures and sexual innuendoes throughout the day. I was the only girl who worked there. I was fifteen when I started, revising for my GCSEs on my iPhone 4 while on shift. I was paid £8 an hour. I didn’t work there for very long. I left feeling like a failure, wondering why all my friends were getting on fine in the fluorescently lit back rooms of Waitrose wearing polyester uniforms with itchy labels on their necks.

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Since then, I’ve only had one job for more than six months. Each and every employment ended with either total burnout, meltdown, suicidal ideation, self harm, eating disorders, or substance abuse problems. The job I managed to hold onto for more than a year was at an SEN college where the management were well-versed in the needs of neurodiverse people and would allow me accomodations while at work and frequent, consequetive sick days (paid). They valued my skills as a support worker and knew I was more capable at delivering high quality work when I was working at my own pace and recognised the value in prioritising this over consistency. There’s only so much time you can take off, though, and in 2024 I had to stay in bed for the majority of the year and lost my job. Since then I have been floating, navigating a benefits system designed to make unemployable people as poor and miserable as possible so that we either “get over our illnesses” (push ourselves into burnout and prolonged/compounded symptoms) or choose to die. I choose neither. I choose purgatory. I pause while I wait to figure out how I (The Tortoise) can succeed in The Hare’s world.

The noise of our parents/bosses/governments/friends’ expectations for us to show up every day the same is deafening. The loudness of the self-criticism as we watch the Hare-like people on social media get promoted, attend artist’s residencies, buy houses, get pregnant, get married, etc. feels rather like the jeering crowd of all the animals expecting The Tortoise to lose. But The Tortoise won.

The Tortoise won. How? Because he knows himself and he knows The Hare. He knows that his slowness is perceived as a limitation and that the arrogant Hare will not see him as a threat and therefore not see him at all. The Hare’s arrogance blinds him and gives The Tortoise a cloak of invisibility. The Tortoise is confident in his abilities. So confident that he actually puts himself in the running. He spends the week training but does not return a week later with magical abilities or enhanced speed. He returns with the big-picture mindset that provides him with the knowledge that he can win.

It is this mindset that wins him the race, not his physical abilities. The Tortoise is a quiet creature, underestimated and unseen by all the animals, not just The Hare. He allows himself the space and the quiet to truly consider and understand the world. He knows the nature of bravado and does not fall for it. He knows that arrogance is often the armour protecting feelings of inferiority. He knows that it is a mask that distorts the vision of the wearer who believes that ability is synonymous to invincibility. The arrogant Hare is not grounded in reality but in visions of being a storybook hero, a record breaker, a legend.

The Tortoise knows that to be these things is to be a version of something not a whole someone. He knows that The Hare chases stories and needs the sound of a cheering crowd to feel important. He knows that real heroes are not always front-runners with medals on their lapels, that real success is not always materialistic. There is no tangible prize to win this race. For The Hare, to win is to prove to himself that he’s a winner. To The Tortoise, to win is to be an example that speed or enhanced physical ability is not the only thing that can make us a winner.

As noted in my previous essay, slowness is a portal to wisdom. It allows you to see more of the world, not less. Slowing down shows us the details. The detail of humanity is in our behaviour, emotional responses and histories. Slow creatures like The Tortoise are able to spend time philosophising on these details and come to see patterns within them. They build strong abilities to preempt not just other people’s behaviour but their own. The Tortoise is a successful tortoise. He is a well adapted creature, able where he is able and not able where he is not able. He’s built for his environment. The difference between The Hare and The Tortoise is that The Hare only knows his strengths whereas The Tortoise knows both his strengths and his weaknesses. This gives him the upperhand. He does not shoot ahead, running at a speed faster than he is able to maintain. He accepts himself. He trusts his emotional insight. He knows The Hare’s weaknesses. He knows that The Hare will underestimate him. He knows he will win before the starter shoots the gun.

Aesop’s fable of The Hare and The Tortoise is a much needed reminder in today’s world. I want it to return to our mindsets un-blotched by the subliminal messaging of the digital world. I came home from Cornwall via London. I lost count of the many signs advertising various types of AI that can help us do absolutely everything faster. I worry that the hustle and grind of the economically inclined “western” world is too fast and society is running full steam ahead, losing sight of the powerful underdogs of the human experience such as fables like this one, as well as art and poetry. It is these facets of life, the emotional education of the arts, that help us create new and better ways of being that benefit everyone, not just the select able-minded and able-bodied. These facets dawn on us slowly and burn as steadily as a hearth. They require time and patience to study and find the resources within. The collective society is not slowing down for long enough to unravel the problems of speed and convenience. The problems that are manifesting in record breaking temperatures, the silence surrounding genocides, the mental health crisis born from social media usage and the rapidly increasing numbers of sick and impoverished young people unable to afford the cheapest rent.

I didn’t know I was a Tortoise. I thought I was a very incapable Hare. I started the race at full speed and fell down halfway through from fatigue, unable to understand why my body was incapable of matching the speed of people who are just different from me. I can’t participate in the rushing screens. I find the big city noise too much. I can’t participate in industry how industry wants me to participate. I am a domestic creature. Born to write, craft and sleep. I am inconsistent. I am quiet. I don’t speak up at dinner parties. I avoid busy places. I turn off my phone. I am finding my pace. It is so much slower than I ever imagined. I am trying to accept it. I am trying to learn how to shut out the jeering of the crowds. I slowly make my way back to my environment. I accept the discomfort that this journey will provide me with, for I am a long way from where I need to be. The blistering sun shines on my back but I move steadily towards the shade, my prize. I will find a way to win it. I exalt the underdog and call upon The Tortoise within me to come forward and give me the confidence to believe I can still win.

I don’t know when I will receive a genuine diagnosis or when I might expect a conversation about treatment for my chronic fatigue, inflammation, hormonal issues etc. I live now without regard for this aspect of my future. I am a tree with a bicycle in my trunk. I’ve grown around my illness. It is with me but it is not me. I’ll say no more about the defines of my discomfort and talk instead on finding the abstract medicines for my abstract disease. I indulge in the quiet. Crafts are my fix.

As I darn, I live. I am alive. I am experiencing something. This craft is political. I’ll fix all the holes, mend all the socks. I’ll never need to buy a pair again. To be sick; to sick to work, to regularly leave the house, is to live outside of the capitalist’s realm. I can’t consume the plastic culture like the grab-and-go city-slick subway surfers of big city life. I can’t afford it. The industrial pharmaceuticals don’t cure me. The screens hurt my eyes. I need the herbs. Soil medicine. The stuff that grows in abundance on the side of the motorway and forever in the perennial fields. That’s all I have right now.

As I darn, I think. I realise. I connect with something beneath the quiet. The injury done to this jumper tells me where to thread my needle. It goes to the places weakened by use, by wear. Elbows, sleeves. I am interacting with the past. This destruction was innocent. Made by wear and therefore made by love. The shape shifts as I weave. First a perfect diamond, then an ancient arrowhead, soon maybe the sail of a ship. Soon maybe the chip in my front tooth. It’s no different than abstract art. I’m at the Tate Modern and I’ve not left my living room. I’m thinking about the atom, thinking about creation and the genesis of man, of me. This weave is as jagged as the rocky beaches in Cornwall. This shape is as mysterious as the fortune tellers of New York City.

There’s a hole in my jumper no more. I do not need a new one. Mending is better than ending. In this act of repair I touched the hand of my great, great, great grandmother. Retain this knowledge or lose it to a Brave New World. The one with all the speed. The rush of this world makes living feel like an emergency. I don’t think this is a fair price for convenience. I think we should all learn how to fix things and relax. Modernity fired me for needing to sit down and sleep during the day. Now I live slowly as the digital age burns on outside my window. Protected by neglect, I have learned so much. My act of defiance is being un-useful to a world that wants to use me, one where we cannot be sick and afford food at the same time. My poorly body was discarded by society and so I found a better way of life in ancient texts. The old world still turns. The old medicines still work. Community is the bedrock, not money. Illness is a portal to wisdom. So is aging. So is slowness. There is happiness here in the quiet beneath the stars. Slow down and you will find it. Slow down and you will see more of the world, not less.

What happens to the teens hellbent on suicide when they turn twenty-eight? We catch ourselves watching the sun kiss the face of a cafe window as a young girl starts her first shift and we see ourselves through her eyes so like the trees that line my street; older, wiser, hellbent on nothing and accustomed to living. We catch ourselves enveloped by the smallness of our lives, strolling into town with a small smile on our faces on the way to pick up dental floss and a bouquet of tulips for a new vase. We see our schoolmates enter their wedding halls and third trimesters with fat bellies and diamond rings and let it be normal. Eventually, we come to see that beyond the mundane sorrow babies will be born, summer will thrive and the trees will reliably resurrect each spring unfazed by loss and the tragedies that occur elsewhere. we come to see that miracles are rare and stop waiting fort them. We find them instead where they belong, in the miraculous simplicity of hanging clothes to dry in a space that is just ours and in the moments where morning arrives again with birdsong and quiet.

Twenty-eight feels like landing on a distant shore salt stained and blue from swimming back from a shipwreck. This land is mine for it is made from all the things that make me. Across the way there is a lighthouse and closer there is a theatre. The curtain closes on a long-running play, one I’ve seen too many times. Now all the villains look like puppets and I don’t find them frightening anymore. I see them take a final bow and know they will de-stage this show. Everywhere else is beginnings. Here lies the infancy of my future.

I see a photograph of an old friend who I haven’t seen since school. She and I both nursed our sorrow like a sick bird. She’s eight months pregnant and smiling, surrounded by love. We are really doing this, then. Growing up. It is time to face the screaming world and get used to the noise. Face the world or don’t. It will turn either way.

I exalted suffering to give it meaning. I prayed to a desolate altar and mistook my pain for purpose. For a while, it felt so big that I thought it could save the world. Growing up is realising that if the world was saved today it would need to be saved again next week. I cannot manipulate the world into a harmonious place, not even my rage is powerful enough to do that. So, what now? Humans are savage, yes. Humans are also kind.

It is becoming very clear to me that everything is happening everywhere all at the same time. We don’t have to wait for it. All of living is living. The ket heads grow up, become bankers and it is wonderful. The stoners hang up the hash pipe, become parents. The suicidal teens? They grow up too. They let the future happen. They have babies, it would seem, and these kids are special because they come from a parent who said, Fuck you, savages. I’ve seen the evil and I choose love. There are mountains and music and doctors and heroes. Ending war is just as human as starting one. I choose life, you can’t scare me, you can’t win. I’ll have it all. I’ll see it all. All the magic and the madness. All the dancing and the dying. I know where to find miracles. I choose the quiet life. I choose life. I choose living.

NEW NOISE

It was quiet once when there 
Were no telephone masts and war planes
I bang my head against modernity 
And wonder into the new noise
If I will be loud enough

I WOULD DROWN

To not think about you 
Is to not think about water
While I am submerged 
In it

ON A TRAIN TO LONDON

The world opens her hungry jaws
Her teeth are like pearls
And she extends her Hollywood tongue

I am awake, unsatiated, dissatisfied 
Some kind of empty 
Hungry for The Ghost

I read my own fortune 
On a train to London

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You were right about everything. I have loved having you by my side these past years but it is time for you to return to your youth to ride out the next scrap. I think you’ve seen enough to know we’ll be alright. You will find the places and the people you know are out there. Go and make the mistakes. We’ll survive.

Before you leave, I have a few things to say.

I still visit your house regularly. Your room is different, neutral, painted over. Dad looks like Grandpa Jack. The dogs are gone but we can all still hear them so they haven’t gone far. We thought the space they would leave would feel like a wound or a hole in the chest but actually it feels like space. It’s a calm, quiet space. Two creatures who only loved and played and dreamt for fourteen years could leave nothing behind that feels like damage. The space they used to inhabit is warm and grateful to have held them for so long. The lasting impression of them has the same quality as the memories of them. It’s actually okay. The house and Time and all of us are better now that they were there, once. The phrase you loved, the price of love is loss, is true. But also, the price of love is love. You know now that death is not always a tragedy. I am glad you know this eventually. These memories will not haunt you. These memories are powerful weapons against the brutality of existence.

Everyone is getting older. Politics is bad. You will sing about it on stage and in music studios and do your best to wield the pen as you always wanted to but you will see more than the bad politics. Your vast and curious mind is your gift. While it causes you so much distress as you are now, young and surprised at what savagery the world contains, it will also cause you joy. You see it all. You know that beyond the system and the decaying structure of the modern world there are lessons to be learned. You are right, you always were. Don’t give up on this because the people around you are frightened by it. You have moon eyes. You can see in the dark.

There’s a song, Time Is A Dark Feeling by Florist, that will help you when you feel the strangeness of seeing the friends become parents, the parents become grandparents. It’s weird because it’s not that weird. Aging is the most normal thing in the world. As normal as being born. No one looks any different. As hair silvers, eyes brighten and shine from the faces you’ve known forever. It happens slowly. Aging is not shocking. They all look the same. They do get wiser.

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The elders around you are growing, untying knots you believed could not even be loosened. The change here is as wonderful as the cool shower after a long, hot car ride back from the sandy beach. People do wisen as they age. Let the world show you its innocence. Let yourself believe in change without questioning it. Evil is so loud, so gory, and it yells and yells until red in the face. If you look at it long enough it starts to look like fear. Hope is subtle. You can’t see it very easily yet. I think I’ve shown you how to find it though, in the cracks of light that peek through curtains and in the spiderwebs that hang in places of quiet beauty. Take photos of it, document it, come to know it as loudly as you know cruelty. If evil is an explosion then hope is a steadily burning hearth. If evil screams then hope sings. Hope is as prevalent as evil. Love, hope, joy and peace are equal, if not more abundant, than hate, despair, misery and conflict. It seems so small to you, too small, but you are wrong to think that. You are still hanging out on the dark side of the moon. Hope is the postwar generation getting therapy. Hope is the truth that summer always comes. Hope is making friends with people who make you feel how you felt when you were seven years old, uncorrupted by brutality and free from self consciousness. Hope is two dogs that were not afraid of your madness when everyone else was. Hope is singing. Hope is singing. Hope is finding love and letting it change you.

You will change. You will never know yourself as you want to know yourself, as a complete thing, you can’t, nothing stays the same until it is dead. To live is to change constantly, to shift into all of yourself. We are all made of empty space, there is so much room to explore. It is why I must send you home. I am changing. I am becoming someone we haven’t been yet. I brought you here so I could help you. You arrived, frail bird, with a broken wing, limping in circles. I healed what could be healed and then we figured out together the type of weather that makes us sick. Without you, I would have never known the bounds of my safe-keeping. We do not belong in clubs or pubs. We cannot show up every day the same. We need a lot of rest. So, return to your youth and finish growing up, enjoy what there was to enjoy. Hang out in car parks and find the city beautiful while you still do. Wear uncomfortable shoes while you still have the resilience for it. Smoke cigarettes before they make you feel sick. I have a new world to explore. It’s different, warmer. There is an orangeness to it, as real as amber and bigger than anything you’ve ever known. I rest in a busy bed. I plan to kick the nightmares. I’ll get it together, build upon the carpeted bedrock of love, decommission the wide radio waves of my spirit that have searched and reached towards an ever receding horizon for the false promise of perfection. I’ll keep it simple. I’ll keep it silly. I’ll love the imperfect things. It’s time to wind down, hang up darkness, kiss the night goodnight. I plan on becoming a glass half full kind of guy.

Stay safe, there is one hell of a storm coming. I will tell you what the fortune teller did not. It will pass.

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TW. This poem holds nothing back. It explores the darker feelings surrounding having an undiagnosable, disabling chronic illness. 

IT

IT built a ladder to my skull and sits on my head like a painted gargoyle, spitting blood,
IT lingers like sulphur, IT lingers like sulphur,
IT infiltrated my bones and now they are black,
IT screams into the quiet like a fatal alarm clock,
IT asks questions ceaselessly like riddles made of gobbledegook speaking in tongues just to entertain itself,
IT is the tepid bath drawn to burn away the lingering doom of all the tired tomorrows, 
IT is the truths held to hurt and the lies that soften childhood, 
IT is the old movies we can't watch anymore, 
IT is the endless well also known as the void,
It is the chaotic moon from nightmares, 
IT is the glowing of a dark alley behind the beautiful parts of London, 
IT is war, cataclysm and a broken radio, 
IT is the ignorant biplane over my shipwreck, 
IT is a glacier that is melting, 
IT is all the cocaine and the ketamine, 
IT is nobody's summer, 
IT is the song you used to love and all the disasters, 
IT is the vacant and disturbing eyes of Dr. Wastie, 
IT is the mob that hung Jesus for sins he didn't commit, 
IT is the cross upon which I hang for sins I didn't commit, 
IT is Catholicism and my grandmother's open veins, 
IT is abandonment and my open veins, 
IT is sewers and madness and electric shock therapy, 
IT is the sigh that glows off electric desires, 
IT is the first c**k I ever tasted and the one after and the one after, 
IT is the menagerie of cursed gemstones, 
IT is the menagerie of cursed gemstones, 
IT is the horse that won't drink, 
IT is the dreams, the dreams, and all the rotten fruit, 
IT is the office towers that rape my skyline, 
IT is the silenced songbird, the shattered vow, 
IT is all the burned books and all the burned witches, 
IT is all the stomach aches and wakeless days, 
IT is the novel never written and the song never sung, 
IT is the car-crash stories we are told, 
IT is the empty cinema, the burned down loft, the stopped watch, the broken egg, 
IT is forgotten religion and old medicine,
IT is the knowledge of the promise of soil. 

All Milk No Love

Sleep against a window pane, 
My bed a reaching heart, 
I wonder what the buffet cart will bring. 

All milk no love
All milk no love

Horse On A Hill

The horse on the hill is innocence
And he who would sheer sheep in winter
Should die beneath a petrified tree

Matted City

I want these matted city tongues
Where there’s tar in the air
You don’t question his madness, 
Just mine. 
I’ll give my thoughts to you, 
I don’t want them anymore.

This bed is the altar of abandon,
It cries for more weight.

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I miss magazines. I miss when my subscriptions would arrive on a school day and I’d see it on the floor by the door like a little gift and it would be a small gift but still something to set the tone of my day. Oh Comely was my talisman, the object upon which I could use to portal into my own realm. I would leave it on the hall table and then walk through the dull streets to school where I felt weird and different and lonely. Somewhere waiting for me at home was a comrade to show me people and music and art from corners of the world I was too young to know. Oh Comely was my mirror because it showed me who I am. I miss the scent of it, the flat, still, plain scent of new paper. I used to know this smell so well. It is now a scarce scent and I took it for granted. On a Sunday I’d sit in a sunny spot of my childhood home with a green tea and peel the plastic film and gaze at printed illustrations, deliberating on whether or not I should tear it out and ruin the publication so I could look at it on my wall every day. I never did but I think now I should have. I would flip straight to the back to the playlist and then find each song on YouTube. In the days before queues and autoplay I would type the name of each song individually and I would catch a wisdom from the name of the artist and the poetry of their song titles. I found so many of my favourite artists this way; Keaton Henson and Bright Eyes ended up shaping the landscape of my school years. I spent time with these artists, listening to albums on repeat because nothing would play after it. The song would end and I would finish the article in silence. I miss endings and I miss silence. Nothing ends now. Credits don’t even roll anymore.

I still have a CD mix from my friend’s older sister, Sunflower, Sunflower Go Back To Sleep, she called it. She designed the whole thing, cover to cover, in collages from MAGAZINE CUT OUTS and PAPER illustrations. It is getting bleached from the sun and falling apart from use. How wonderful for something to look so loved. How beautiful the colours are now all faded and changed and aged. It was the first gift that pierced through the mundanity of living in a dead town and made me feel hope. It said you are not alone and weird because I am one of you and I know you will like this and I will spend a week making you something. This CD and its broken plastic sheath is a totem of a gone thing. A lost thing still found. I see you, lost things, I still love you. I have moved from house to house with it. It sits there in an old suitcase safe and protected from the ever digitising landscape of culture. I remember how the sound feels. It scratches and skips now. It has no successors, no heirs, the poor thing, last of its kind, nearly extinct.

My mother talks often about street parties on the crescent she grew up in just outside of East London. She’s a royalist because the queen reminds her of community, because the queen was a reason for everyone in her street to bake a silly amount of cakes and gather on the road knowing no cars would come down it because everyone was getting merry on the neighbour’s punch. I can see the plastic table cloths and victoria sponges in her memories when she beholds a jubilee mug in a charity shop. I can feel the post-war high spirits, the brief glory days in the early seventies that make her proud to be British. I can hear the lullaby in her voice when she tells me that her father would be the first to volunteer their house for a piss up. He’d call the street indoors and they’d drink whiskey and sing and when someone set their pouffe on fire with a lit cigarette they covered up the burn mark with a rug and told the story through belly laughs at Christmas. My grumpy, sullen grandfather would be the life and soul of these parties. I never saw a photograph of these occasions and I hardly saw him smile when he was alive but there is something in the way my mother talks about it that it’s as though she projects her memories into my own and I can see him, younger and war-ishly handsome, hands raised and smiling, kicking his legs in line dance. I can see their house, the quiet house I spent so much time in as a child, alive and noisy with people. I can see it through the smallness of my mother as a child, the polyester skirts and trousers as she went around swigging the dregs of everyone’s drink and collecting cigarette butts to relight later. I can feel the summer in these stories, the heat prickled skin, the bellies full of sugar and London air before it got so gross. She’s kept her old chopper, my dad fixed it up in the lockdown, she talks about riding up and down her street on it. Then she tells us about how she chipped her tooth skateboarding because there was a time before iPads when kids played outside. I remember it briefly. I caught the end of it. Oh, how lucky I am to know this type of childhood outside play. Though, the quiet had already sunk it’s teeth into my culture. I played outside on my own, skateboarding, but I saw no one else. I made no friends this way. My street was an empty place. How I long for the pain of the crescent over the pain of the world.

I want to ask her how it felt to be twenty two and bored. I want to know what the quality of boredom used to be before doom scrolling junk food of the mind. I want to know how it felt to be alone, really alone, with just a landline phone and letters. I want to ask her if she studied the sky, the patterns in the rug, if she ever read the phone book because there was nothing else to do. I want to know if she ever sat on her bed and watched the room go dark moment by moment because there was nothing on TV and she’d finished all her books and the radio felt too loud. I want to know what libraries used to look like when they were still cornerstones of community. I want to know how it felt to wait for a train. I want to know how frustrating it was to wait for someone who is late. I want to know all the things that happened because someone was late or didn’t show up and couldn’t send a quick message to let her know. I want to know how many times she went somewhere because she felt too guilty just not showing up and there was no way to call ahead and say she couldn’t make it and then I want to know what happened when she arrived, who she might not have met, what might not have happened if it were so easy to bail last minute. I want to know how it would feel to experience my misery without my hands twitching to my phone only to find again and again and again that there is no one inside it to save me from it. I want to know if I would survive it. If my misery is a product of the times or just my mind. Where would my hands would twitch instead? Would they curl into prayer? Would they open a book? Would they punch a wall?

I want to know how my father felt when he left Dublin and landed at Gatwick airport with only the address of the one friend who landed a year before him, the poetry of a land he does not know, of a road name with no meaning yet, only ideas and expectations. Did he carry a paper map, stop on the way to the train station to unfold it and spend five minutes trying to place himself before giving up and asking for directions? Who did he ask? Were they nice to him? Were they smoking a cigarette? Did he get their name? Does he remember it? I want to know if he carried a walkman or portable radio? What precious music did he decide to bring with him? Did he look out of the train window and see London and imagine his life there? Did he think of me in that moment, his far away un-conceived child who would turn out so like the mother he left behind? What did he do when he arrived at his new flat? Had he seen it before? Or was it just described to him? Did he find the nearest payphone and call home? Was communication that urgent or did he wait? How long did wait? What is the quality of the silence whilst waiting for someone to call and tell you that they are safe? Is it a lonely silence full of worry? Or is it a peaceful silence full of trust? Was London more alive in the eighties? Or does it look the same? Is the past the same colours as now?

Once, it rained and I read all day. I don’t remember what book, how old I was or what day of the week it was. I just know it happened. More than once. Once, I was not tempted to reach out to anyone. I was not disturbed by a vibration, a lighted up screen or the temptation to watch short form videos. I was in a different world, unbothered by reality. I had a favourite type of paper to write on, my desk was full of poems I’d written out from books. The news came on at six and again at ten and I would receive the information about the world or I would miss it. I could go days without knowing the things I can’t change. There was a stillness. I remember it. I remember the scent of it. The wood polish scent of it. The way dust danced in spring. The noise of radio jingles and birdsong. The sound of a bicycle spurring past my window. It felt like it used to be sunnier, then. Or perhaps I just noticed it more when I saw sunlight more often than I saw the light of an LED screen.

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I wrote this poem last summer when I realised the sort of god I was raised to worship was a god who took me away from the world. I wanted to step towards grounding myself and choosing the moment. That same summer I wrote a song, God’s Not Here, that I will be performing at Shipyard Groan gigs from May onwards. This poem is a pre-curser to an essay which I will publish this spring with expanded ideas on the topic.

For now, here is the poem.

Waiting For “GOD”

I meet myself on the abandoned page
Searching for “GOD” again
In the new quiet of a once busy place
Where a piano once played
CLANK CLANK

My hands meet palm to palm 
I don’t know if I am praying or begging
And they twitch towards the dull-eyed 
Computer like some lost moth that finds
Only small despairs within the LED. 

I’ve been looking for “GOD” for so long
That my eyes are too wide from 
Peering beyond the moon and ignoring
The beautiful apathy of sunlight behind
Morning curtains

I’ve been waiting so long my breath is
Baited, hanging in small whispers upon
The fable of a heaven somewhere. And
When I wake into sin with a swollen cunt
Wet from dreams, I promise I didn’t want it, 
But only because I know it doesn’t come to 
The ones that wait. 

I’ve been searching for “GOD” for so long
That I thought I saw Him in the eyes of 
The Catatonic — awake — just — 
After a trip to the Cellar Door where they 
Knock, knock, knocked and knock, knock
Knocked but came back anyway with a 
Patchwork heart and nothing to say. 

I thought I saw Him in the flicker of a 
Finger that recognised my voice and I 
Followed Him into my stone conclusion 
Where I grazed my knee and where the 
Endless scrape still weeps. 

Nothing happened today and nothing
Happened today and nothing happened
But maybe something but certainly no 
Heavenly gates just a Boy With Wide 
Eyes and black shoes. Just a rosary in 
Some charming junkyard. 

I move my hands to my side and touch 
The Unholy ground and admit that my 
Stomach is growling. I’ll search forever
Before I find Him. Hunger is the Ever Tide
Of Being and I’ve stalked the wild desert 
Plains of England hunting the perfect apple
Only to eat it and hunger again within the hour. 

If “GOD” wasn’t already invented I’d have invented
Him right there in that empty train station where
A piano once played. 

I wonder if I’ll spend the rest of Forever cleaning
The life from beneath my nails. 

I meet myself here where smoke lingers on my
Hair like something that hasn’t happened yet. 

My shoes are fallen apart from all the waiting

I allow the dirt behind my nails and forgive it

I leave the once busy place 

It smells like grey skies

The day closes

No heaven falls, just 

Fades.

Here is an original Shipyard Groan song to listen to while you read this piece.

“The machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.” (1)

- AUDREY LORDE -

The Tower (Tarot) is a card of dissolution, chaos, destruction. It is rarely welcome, usually feared. In a dusty attic above the Brighton Laines earlier this week, my tarot reader anticipated panic and hastily told me not to worry as she pulled it, alongside Death, in the pile that represents the future. I told her I was not afraid. I know this card well. I have come to appreciate it. The third card she pulled was The Chariot; action, movement, control. Ah, I thought, I know what this all means. Donnie Darko says that destruction is a form of creation. Destruction is also movement, change, release, freedom.

As an archetype, The Tower’s purpose is to deconstruct so that the next card, The Star, can move you to action healing and reconstruction. The Tower only falls because it is built on unstable ground. By the time it finishes falling you have the raw materials and the lessons to build again, stronger. These lessons come from watching it fall, seeing the weak spots, interrogating what went wrong and why. As with all the cards, readings and interpretations are vast. On a personal scale, there are many ways The Tower can show up for you. Some examples are that it can destroy the elements of your life that belong to the past or the aspects of yourself that were crafted from a place of insecurity or trauma. It can deconstruct your current environment in order to move you to a place better suited to you. It can also destroy on a wider scale. It can represent wars and poverty born from greed. It can represent epidemics of illness that signpost deeper rooted institutional problems. It can be used to talk about oppression. The Tower is very present in the current state of the world. The destructive forces of humanity and therefore nature are extreme. It is important we know how to understand this destruction through the lens of The Tower.

It is not a colonial way of being to remain present in pain and disaster. A lot of British folks are raised with a “chin up” attitude, placating pain with a “there, there, don’t cry,” sentiment. The average British person is likely to experience more fear than empathy when someone expresses their needs or outwardly experiences their pain. This obstacle creates an additional first step towards deeper connection, group healing and soothing others: overcoming an overwhelming fear. This powerful fear breeds shame and then shame is weaponised. Years of feminism fight the “angry black woman trope” alongside accusations and stereotypes of hysteria and neediness in women. Casual dating culture prioritises poor communication, avoidant breakups, and shallow conversation with dating advice regularly asking women to “play it cool”, usually by pretending they want and need less than they do. Fear of genuine connection and community is rife in the UK. This is due to pain and darkness being taboo subjects, resulting in a large percentage of adults that do not know how to hold it, look at it, understand it. We are progressing, I am glad to see therapy is becoming less taboo, but we have a long way to go.

My confrontational mindset in an avoidant British suburb othered me. I struggled to make friends and processed all of life’s inevitable disaster on my own, without the right support to move through pain presently - the only way I knew how. I was laughed at for being “too deep”, told to lighten up, and constantly questioned on why I listen to depressing music.* I was also regularly accused of wallowing, choosing sadness, of being in love with the dark. The painful events that I experienced were serious. I was not wallowing over missing out on parties or being unable to have the things I wanted, rather I was grieving losses to suicide, trying to understand my mother’s life threatening illness, asking questions and interrogating oppression, staying curious and critical about the work culture I was raised into and not coping in. I was born sensitive and curious. It was not natural for me to ignore such matters. I wanted to understand them but the adults around me could not educate me. This is the type of pattern that creates generational trauma. Neglect breeds neglect. The Tower asks for these patterns to break. It destroys and destroys until you pay heed to what is causing the destruction and fix it from the root. The Tower is the ever-present damp that will not dry until the wall comes down to reveal a structural degradation that threatens the entire house.

Due to my lifetime of dwelling in the dark, I have come to a good place within it. I know my way around, I know how long I need to stay and how to get myself out. I am Persephone: queen of the dark underworld, daughter of the bright summertime. Just like with any environment, the more you look the more you see. The more time you spend in the dark (presently, in conversation with your own fear and boundaries), the more it can reveal to you. Night is half of our daily experience on earth. Winter is half of our annual experience on earth. To learn how to get comfortable in these spaces is to learn how to expand your life and ensure you do not spend half of your time hiding. Our experience on earth is set up so that we may learn what happens in our abundant shadows.

It is not safe to move through traumatising events without real support. Therapy is a great resource for this, as are less expensive books and podcasts, but most importantly we need to educate the population so friendship, family and community can support itself through misfortune no matter who you are, how much spare time you have and what your financial situation is. My deep interest in the esoteric, poetic, and mythology educated me through darknesses that had meaning beyond hurt. Old Gods, native cultures that survived colonisation, and literature are all places where this education remains. There is a wealth of nuanced storytelling in the Greek Myths, for example, that have aided me in my emotional education. This last year I felt The Tower start to fall in my personal life and instead of dissociating, medicating and getting on with it, I interacted with the pain as an entity. It revealed themes and divine messaging that moved me through to the other side of it. I stand now at the start of the lunar year and cast my eyes over the new flattened ground of the last one. Had I done my best to ignore the events of my last year, pushed my feelings aside and distracted myself with mundane work, self-medication and masking, I would not be in a position of power now. I think this power is the reason why colonisers oppress cultures that have a strong relationship to pain. The men in control (who create the wars and therefore the sickness of the mind and body that war produces) are the men who tell other men that boys don’t cry, that women are too sensitive and that it is weak to let pain stop you in your tracks. This powerful messaging is the messaging that has men signing up to give their lives to a country that wants only real estate or oil or white supremacy. These are not valuable cosmic belongings. So, the cosmic is stripped away and emotional responses to greed and violence are shamed into silence. But pain is strong. It is a powerful entity. It commands, demands, asserts itself until it is felt. It is meant to be held and listened to. It is a harbinger of change. Pain protects us. If you wear painful shoes your feet will hurt until you change the environment of your foot. This pain protects you from long-term damage that can become a disability. Pain creates the boundaries of our safety. To know how to read it is to know how to move forward from it, how far you can push your boundaries, how to change for the better, how to let The Tower take what it needs to take without destroying you in the process.

It is important that we seek help to learn how to navigate it. A lot needs to change in this country in order to create an emotionally supportive environment for our homeless people, neurodiverse, POC, LGBTQIA+ and disabled population. This cohort of people are excellent signposts for the direction we are headed. The sensitive and oppressed folk are the first to experience both physical and mental chronic health conditions. According to The Guardian, the pay gap stands at £2,548 per year. Trades Union Congress’ general secretary Paul Nowak states, “Women have effectively been working for free for the first month and a half of the year compared to men.”(2). An article on the UK Gov website discusses the misogyny in the medical treatment of women, stating that more than 4 out of 5 women said “their symptoms were not taken seriously or dismissed upon first contact with GPs and other health professionals”, “they had to persistently advocate for themselves to secure a diagnosis, often over multiple visits, months and years”, and “if they did secure a diagnosis, there were limited opportunities to discuss or ask questions about treatment options and their preferences were often ignored.” This report goes on to state that “black respondents were much less likely to rely on GPs or healthcare professionals than all other ethnic groups.”(3). On top of this, the fact that homeless death was at an all time high in 2024, and that people from minority ethnic groups are overrepresented in UK prisons (5), demonstrate that the system this country is built on is made only for a specific cohort of people. If you cannot adjust succinctly to fit into this personhood, you are neglected. This neglect is creating the desperation that turns people to crime and/or suicide. This neglect is creating long-term sickness.

To ignore suffering and to label the sensitive people and minority groups as mad or weak or violent is breeding a culture of dissonance. Raising children without understanding their own suffering creates adults who are too afraid to respond to pain to teach their own children how to taste the sweet within the bitter, how to use pain to learn their boundaries, and how to keep them safe from emotional and physical danger. Also, teaching children how to understand their own pain and process their emotions prevents sadness from being mistaken as anger, feelings of controllessness from manifesting as greed, and a lack of self worth from resulting in manipulation and control of others.

Going into the dark means listening to it. It will not always say what you want to hear. Sometimes it will say you need to start all over again. Sometimes it will say you need to stay where you are and finish the work. Sometimes it will help you realise your illness is a result of being previously unable to recognise pain, of not realising how serious or dangerous something was. It will wake you up. It will move you to speak. It will move you to fight. It will move you to change. If we all look into our personal darknesses, the darkness of humanity will be seen. If we all help ourselves, we can help our friends, and then the whole world is helped. Do not underestimate the power of self reflection. If every single person on earth did the work to heal themselves, the whole world would be healed. If half the world did it, half the world would be healed. That is no small feat.

*While this was the case, “depressing music” was my solace. I listened to lyrics that echoed my feelings which were disregarded by others around me. I listened to Bob Dylan and learned that being a hero doesn’t always mean saving lives in a physical manner but by sharing messages of oppression on a larger scale. I understood myself listening to Bright Eyes. I found that, in the town where no one wanted to talk about what was happening to people less fortunate than them, music was full of people who were able to confront what I wanted to confront.

Links to Article Research:

1. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chigaco, in 1977.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/15/gender-pay-gap-persist-30-years-uk-tuc

2. https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/womens-health-strategy-call-for-evidence/outcome/results-of-the-womens-health-lets-talk-about-it-survey

3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg9ygnj44no

4. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04334/SN04334.pdf

Article image at the top of the page, (broken tower), is taken from the Public Domain Image archive courtesy Joseph Sablé Centre.

The prime minister wants me dead and he will kill me with HMOs, 
Minimum wage, and conventional agriculture.
I will starve and drag my feet while he keeps his finger on 
Genocide and masterminds a satanic dispossession. 
He brandishes no sword but bureaucracy,
His pale hands shimmer with bloodless abandon, 
Clean as the snow that falls on the broken asphalt shingles
Of estate towers threatened by coastal storms and benefit cuts. 

The prime minister wants me dead and he will kill me.
They will erect no statue and the quiet tongues of defeated
Comrades will carry my name until it is distorted by their
Own falling through nets constructed in feeble plastics that
Cannot hold the poisoned generation who writhe in the
Discomfort of tangled root networks and unheard mycelium. 

I dreamt about a totem of gone things, spirit hands tapped on
Bulky tech, reaching into the recent past where privacy 
Kept us safe from deathless robot warfare. Now, the faceless
Name on my computerised UC diary doesn't watch me fall
As they desecrate the ground I stand on.

I am the weight on a system that can afford war but not
The sickness that comes from it.
I am the product of a rich man's convenience. 
I am the condemned, the gallow’s bride executed by
Some guy from Eton who doesn’t know how to spell 
Fibromyalgia. He won't wear a mask as he hangs me, 
He will leave work to drink cocktails that cost more than the 
Wage I’d be paid to educate the next generation. 

This is America without guns,  
The heave of an empire collapsing. 
An exit song, 
The bellow of the abyssal ocean, 
The Telephone Masts at the apocalypse, 
This is the apocalypse, 
I am the zombie,
Undead, 
Half rotted, 
Bound to death
Still living
Causing havoc
To a system 
Built for
Someone
Else

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Stonehenge was built on my chest overnight, I am crucified, torn beneath a dreary sky. I get older, it seems, it is one variable I cannot calm. I spit darkness and the pages of my journal blacken for I am sick with memories. I step one foot at a time across this earth and go in circles. I wish I did not know how far I could travel, how deep the breadth of the world is. I wish for the village and ignorance. My phone is in my pocket and it burns my ass with its chaos and strange meaningfulness. I keep ruining myself because I keep checking the mad bulletin board. I know too much. I wish to be sewing by a hearth though I know I’d be colder, more hungry and maybe even more sick. But I’d be alone. I’d be alone with my maker and all the death of winter. I know I sound mad, I should, I am mad. Though I have been mad before and survived, none should feel concerned, I am accustomed to nightmares. The phone buzzes and my heart dies. I am writing songs and poems in my bedroom, exploring dreams while my muscles deteriorate, no yoga in this wilderness. I value myself with gifts of fermentation and nettle weaved yarns. I cannot tame my hands that are drawn to the guitar, the hagstones and the driftwoods of the ocean I live beside. I do not wait for summer. I do not wait for summer. I get older in my bedroom. I am haunted.

I used to consecrate the mad heroes from their padded rooms as Ginsberg did. I am with you, all of you, in Rockland. Yet I am shy. We can’t all articulate madness and I used to try and I used to be brave and I showed my young companions my version of lunacy and it frightened them. I am older now. I am not a child without knowledge of consequences, rather, I am adulted and I am too accustomed to them. I tried to sunbathe and nearly blinded myself trying to enjoy the summers when I am a winter’s child. I know the price of hiding, I am crippled from it. I hid until I was blue. I hid until I was a mouse in a den of esteemed lions. A mouse in tall drag on stilts staggering alongside winded and spent trying to hold down a job while the world burns. I was a phony because they told me to be and I’m a good listener. Turning twenty-eight in the throes of madness is like becoming my own mother. I take the mouse off her stilts and encourage her to catch her breath. She laments that she’s been catching her breath for too long already. I know this. I don’t know how she’s meant to hold down a job while the world burns, though. Mothering the small mouse within does not necessitate all knowingness. Just me and the mouse now. Neither of us are hiding and I’m banned from the lion’s den. I knit her a small blanket and carry on waiting to get older. One day I will be so old I can’t believe I grew up so fast. I don’t know what to tell her. I can’t tell her I’ve started hiding again. I think she’d be relieved and I don’t know if that’s even a good thing.

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Dear cherished heroes of the mad house I hear you all in my dreams calling from beyond the wheat field. You’ve shown me a land where the sun never sets and I know it is the place from which you all ran. I am seeing the trees that swing like the dead, the animals hurt beneath the rudders of a cargo ship. We span too many plates and now I join you in the manic mosaic of broken china. The ocean is not big enough to hold all our memories, our dreams spit them out and they aren’t as distorted as I wish they were, they aren’t as ruined as the real life that manufactured them.

Dorothy Parker I miss you though I never met you! You are my loony saint who died old! Yours are the footsteps before mine in the sand! If you could just hold my hand, tell me, am I doing everything wrong? I didn’t get in trouble much because I didn’t know you were allowed to break the rules. Oh boy, I am in trouble now, though! If only someone had told me I could break the rules. I’d have started cheating long ago and stopped saying things like ‘that’s not fair’ because I’d have known that my planet is my home and wherever I step I belong and I can do whatever I like there as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. I’d have worn my mad hat and been mad and found the mouse house. I kept asking for permission. May I be mad, now? I wasn’t allowed. I used to yearn for bedlam. It was my secret.

I’m trying to march to the beat of my own drum but people keep looking at me. I think it’s because they know I don’t know what I’m doing, because I am still really just a mouse on stilts beating a marching band drum with the drumsticks in the wrong hands.

I am twenty-eight-years-old now. I will never be this young again. I grow up and gain the knowledge that it’s okay to be young and brainless and so I let myself be. I release myself from personal motherhood and become the daughter to winter who will continue to raise me now. I will grow from the naked gnarled trees and bleed whenever I am beckoned.

Mayhem still calls me. I thought it might’ve stopped by now but I am with those in Rockland, great writers on the same dreadful typewriter, hysterical, daring, fucked, starving and naked.

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I saw my friend Tom at his house a few weeks ago. He brewed us stovetop coffee and offered me toast. We sat in his living room and talked about herbs and gardening and love. Hours passed as quietly as water in a gentle stream and eventually we turned to conversations about darkness and this conversation provided me with a sort of Dawn.

In my previous blog I said I acquired many lessons from my dark winter, lessons I could not yet articulate. I needed to wait for the dust to settle, for my gentle and frost burned face to soften beneath the sun. The words came to me at Tom’s while the sky darkened and the scent of petrichor lifted into his bedroom window. I came home, sat under mid-afternoon lamplight, burned incense and smoked some hash while I collected my thoughts. Here is what I received:

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My chronic pain is not entirely physical. Much is rooted in energy. My soul is bruised. I have always known this but now I understand it. My womb is a portal. It aches (agonises) uncharacteristically when I am heartbroken. It’s a theme, consistent and reliable. I hold it up to my ear like a shell and listen to what it has to say. It tells me not to be afraid of love and family. It asks me to want it. I say, okay womb, fine. But first you have to stop screaming. I like my life and if you don’t stop wanting what you don’t have we can’t be friends. I have plenty. I am abundant. I play the song ‘Stop Your Tears’ by Aldous Harding and it grieves, settles, comfortably empty, for the first time in my life. Then, it dances to ‘We’re Going To Be Friends’ by The White Stripes, a song that returned to my consciousness during a mad bonfire giggle with new friends. I am aligning. Following my pain like a road map.

Our spirit is physical like a song or a conversation or an idea. Emotions are the evidence that the spirit was awake. Trauma is the fist that meets the eye of the spirit. Hope is the firelight that meets the skin of the spirit. Love is the kiss that meets the lips of the spirit. There is a spirit mirror to all things corporeal. The spirit’s scars are spite or bitterness. The atmospheric headache is the experience of anxiety when walking into a room immediately after two people have had an argument.

I was much closer to death than life this winter. My Gods are more like melodies than archetypes. I worship spiders. I return to my knitting and become one.

Being sick has made me more animal. I am aware of what my animal body needs. As a teenager, I used to be all spirit. Of late, I have been all body. April, dear April, melted the winter from me and allowed me to conjoin. I am human again: body and soul.

The recent quiet has shown me that to be human is to be alone. Perhaps that is the point. But I do not think the spirit is mono. I don’t think that whatever we are before we are human is alone. Spiritual Oneness is a popular belief. I agree with it. I think this is why romantic love is so often governed by the merging of bodies. Two people get as close to being one as possible, so much so that we are inside each other’s bodies. Anything that can reach, reaches. Anything that can contain, contains. The product of this is a merged being: a child. It must be a great shock to finally become one entity and that entity is not you, but them. Separate. Being human can feel like one long reaching to relieve ourselves of our aloneness.

We love, love, love and never find ourselves in the same dream.

To quote Grandma Death, “every living creature on earth dies alone.” The conclusion for us all is an act we can only experience alone.

Earth is so isolated. As far as we know there is nothing else. This must mean something. We all feel alone. It is so significantly human that I have come to believe it is not something to avoid but something to experience. Perhaps we come into a human body to take a break from the Oneness. Death is a disintegration of body, a returning to before life. The spirit is unleashed, unformed and reconnects to the cosmic web after experiencing a true aloneness.

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But the spirit is homesick. It cannot be denied its true form. And such is a love that is energised by the very fact it can never complete its fusion. This burning to become one creates desire, an undying flame. So perhaps death is that last gift, the final lonesome tunnel. We’ll transition, learn to let go of all that we came to love and grieve it until we are beyond human again and realise that what we are grieving is simply just the animal bodies of all things cosmic.

We cannot neglect the homesick spirit. We cannot deny it’s true form. Just as our organic bodies must consume the elements of its organic environment to survive - food, water, oxygen, warmth - the spirit must, too. And that is the music, the art, the literature, the intimate.

If our spirit is not nourished, seen, honoured and healed, it, too, will cripple.

So while we experience our aloneness we must keep our spirit healthy. We must share our human experiences to make the most of them. We must love and lose. We must paint and write. We must eat and drink. We must experience the organic soul. We must breathe a peaceful sigh in the knowledge that our home is far from here but we are not needed there for a while.

Things I liked this month:

Song: ‘The Spirit is Carnal’ by Nina Winder-Lind

Album: All of This is Chance by Lisa O’Neill

Book: The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Film/TV: Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Poem: ‘Chenille’ by James Dickey

How long have I been on the moon?

I land gently, soaked in sage with the taste of hell at the back of my mouth.

How was your winter? A gentle question without an answer. I did not have one, I think. I died a little, unformed, disembodied. There is dark chalk beneath my fingernails so I hide them in the pockets of my jeans. I have very little to say now. I am the weary child, placid after a hefty thunderstorm. Or I am the blistered mariner, frostbitten and scarred with a long tale to tell. Though, my darling wedding guests, you will have to wait a while until I find the words.

It is an acutely teenage experience to enter a period of hardship and come out the other side with deep bureaucratic rage and a stubbornness about the world. I’ll be frank about how frightening it is that labour is actively making the lives of disabled people harder, pushing us further into poverty and feeding into the common belief that our value lies in our ability to work and be productive to the standards of able bodied men.

I don’t tend to write so transparently on disability through a political lens. I much prefer to speak of it from the place of soul than the place of bureaucracy but in times like this it is important I speak plainly. We are not in control of our lives.

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According to the NHS, women are more likely than men to experience chronic health issues. I do not think it is a coincidence that this occurs in a patriarchal society. Our system is designed by men which means that women are working in offices that are set to temperatures ideal for men’s bodies, our work schedules do not align to women’s bodies that are cyclical - moving through periods of productivity and rest, and women are expected to show up to the same standard every day in spite of the fatigue, cramping and depression/anxiety that occurs in us all at varying degrees during our pre-menstrual week and menopause. We have to force ourselves through pain, regardless of whether or not we identify as disabled. Every woman knows the scent of blood. Every woman knows and anticipates and factors in pain and discomfort on a monthly basis. We have been taught from a young age not to express our needs, that it is shameful to bleed, that we are not welcome if we are unable to work. We have forced ourselves and our bodies into acting the same way as men’s and it is making us sick.

Now the men who made us sick are pushing us into poverty. If they take my PIP from me I will no longer be able to afford my rent. I don’t know what I will do. I am scared.

I don’t want to resist the modern world. I am born of old spirit, I have always pushed against the digital revolution and modernity and it has always beat me down. I want to yield, I am exhausted from fighting this battle. I do it in small ways. At university I opted for written notes over digital notes until I became so behind trying to hand-write the lecturers presentations that I yielded to revising from a screen. I write letters to my friends, I shop second hand and wear natural fibres that actually keep me warm and last a long time. I think about old markets often, how artists were valued members of society that forged weaponry and knitted much needed clothes and painted to document the happenings. But who needs an artist when you have a machine? The only writing jobs on Indeed are to train AI.

If you think you are not going to be replaced, you are wrong. We are expected to act like machines. We are shunned in our sickness, in our mistakes. Machines are immortal, binary, perfect. Soon these spotless entities will be writing our poetry, our songs and all the resources that teach us how to exist in a human body are obsolete.

I am consistently baffled at this blindness. What happens to us when our consciousness evolves into something digital, when we no longer have to wait for anything to happen?

We are bad at waiting, all of us, but we are supposed to. I preach the gospel of Boredom. I know that I only feel normal when I’m in vast, open spaces; places where I see no evidence of the existence of plastic. Here, I can breathe and remember what I am: animal. I feel too aware of the mess we are making. I am swimming against a rapidly overflowing landfill site.

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We are all just one bad day away from being disabled.

I’ve been sick for three years now and last year I was determined to “get better”. It is humbling to come into an understanding that this isn’t going to happen to me. I worked relentlessly last year, cut out everything that brought me joy to try and heal my disorder: sugar (in all its forms), gluten, dairy, alcohol, nuts, soya, caffeine, cigarettes, CBD/THC (not just a natural pain killer for my musculoskeletal disorder but a fun activity I have always enjoyed) and made myself sicker while I detoxed. In turn, I isolated myself from my community while I powered through. I have healed a lot, I am better than I was, but the symptoms that pushed me to begin this mission persist. I am still disabled.

Healing forced me to confront my animal body. It grounded me. I am extremely grateful for this grounding. My capacity for joy has expanded beyond belief. I gain so much from so little. My relationships are rich and abundant. My passion for art is ignited. Simple pleasure reveals itself to be huge. After long enough, the beauty of a sunset becomes as loud as all the evil in the world.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that there is no cheating. There is no easy way. Boredom is a huge part of being human. We are supposed to wait for trains and stare at the sky and watch as the fire boils the water atop it. We are supposed to walk long distances to see each other, wait in the discomfort or excitement of an anticipated letter, hunt and gather our food.

We are not meant to be comfortable 100% of the time and I am sick and tired of the entitlement of our leaders who believe that comfort is granted. Taking money from the disabled does not stop us from existing. We remind them that life is hard and scary. We remind them that they are mortal. We are what they are afraid of. So, they try to get rid of us. They scramble to fix monumental problems with quick solutions. They scramble to hide the things they perceive as undesirable.

I am born of old spirit. This world is so unfamiliar and I am lost in it always, trying to return to a home I can’t name. I look now for love. I want to live inside someone else’s heart. I look now for music. I want to live inside the cosmic. These are the places I feel at home. I am so dizzy, tired, afraid of the Hollywood movie set that this world is becoming.

We exist and I see you. I hold you. I welcome you into my animal arms.

I stand, I drop my jaw to the floor and crack myself open. I walk through the wound that was once me. Nothing changes except everything.

I will be sharing a poem in a different post that sums all I have spoken about in this piece. I am reading some poems at Mare Zine’s event on the 22nd March (Saturday). If you’re London based, please come and say hello. I’m on first and doors are at 7. I also published the Winter chapbook, the second in my series of seasonal poetry books. My copies are sold out but stay in the loop via my Instagram for the Spring series which will be out next. If you are desperate for a Winter book please get in touch (via Instagram DM or email) and I will see if any other poets have spares.

Things I liked this month:

Song: ‘Ariadna’ by Kedr Livanskiy

Album: So Tonight That I Might See by Mazzy Star

Book: American Poetry 1965 (Critical Quarterly Poetry Supplement Number 6) selected by Rella Lossy

Film: The Sixth Sense

Poem: ‘The Bee Meeting’ by Sylvia Plath and ‘Sylvia’s Death’ by Anne Sexton