Sunday Poets
Smalltown city crew
I used to have stickers of Glasgow-born Jimmy Somerville on my MFI wardrobe. There were also bright photos of Boy George, Wham! Fine Young Cannibals, Kim Wilde and Bananarama. Crushing on the gay boys, since 7. It’s funny the way we become what we always were. We are what we follow. Behaviour becomes Culture. Or Culture Club.
Tonight, I’m excited to read Smalltown Girl, my ode to Jimmy’s Bronski Beat classic, Smalltown Boy.
I bought Smash Hits religiously with my pocket money, before moving onto photostories in Jackie, and later, secretly sneaking J-17, which offered blow-job tips, like I’m sure TikTok does now.
Smash Hits was edited by Mark Frith, who later commissioned me on Sky magazine, and I’ve had other editors who were schooled there, such as Andy Threlfell on Reuters and Linda Duff, who’d stitch me up in Britpop, but later gave me a job on the Daily Star’s Rave Desk. The poem I’m reading tonight is about those days of feeling Smalltown - no agency. I wrote it in the cave in the mountain.
I tried it out on the radio the other day, for Johny Brown (Band of Holy Joy) and his Bad Punk show on Resonance FM with some other bits of writing.
Every time I read this poem through, I change lines. In a few hours, I’m heading down to the Torriano Meeting House in Kentish Town, a place fabled in poetry society as a home for ‘proper poets’. I’ve never considered myself to be one, nor have really ever called myself one, as I identify more as a journalist, despite not really doing that much currently. Not that I don’t work in poetry, and write and perform poems, it’s just more of a practice than something I define myself through. I like to think like a journalist, and channel Poetry as a free space, where the binds of the copywriting I used to do (or editing for brands, or editing pages on DJMag, or the entire purpose of magazines, catalogues, or books) don’t exist.
It’s an event hosted by Lisa Kelly, chair of Magma, a place where proper poets get published.
So it’s almost like a street poet’s knighthood, getting invited to do this tonight, for an event celebrating the Smalltown Boy record by Bronski Beat. There was an exhibition in Glasgow curated by Barney Ashton-Bullock. Performers include Jeremy Reed, and others I’ve published. I’m trying to learn lines, but have a full week of work to prepare for next week, to support the sport of writing, and I’ve been living out of a suitcase for five weeks now. Leaving the van at the airport, for longer and longer stretches.
I miss the zen of the mountains, but there is a beauty to London which still holds, rolling from Chelsea Arts Club yesterday, to a wedding for a friend I have known since she first moved to London as a PR, and she needed a journalist to oblige a record label day out. It’s been a beautiful week, dinner with Irvine and his wife Emma at The Groucho, seeing Kelli Ali at the V&A. Good friends. Being looked after in a beautiful spare room in Richmond, and another in Ruislip. Bouncing out to the Chelsea Arts Club for a talk on Ambit-artist, Ken Cox. Coasting through hotels and countryside in other times, spending time with an elderly friend experiencing the onset of dementia.
Writing here, of friends, and those stickers on my wardrobe, the circles get tighter. My ego fades. It happens because things become real: like my new fave band, the Gurriers, showing up on the cover of a Dublin street mag called The Goo, reading a bootleg copy of Psychomachia - and they’re brilliant.
The grassroots on being an author is unreal. The connection to readers is something I value beyond anything. And it was down to Rob Doyle for sending me this.
My centre is stronger than it has ever been. The purpose of intent crystalises. Leaning into knowing I can love myself, and others love me too. Finally. This is what Smalltown Girl is about.
It is in a pentameter that I speak. But I paste the current version for us below.
SMALLTOWN GIRL
Ahhhh, aaaahhhhhhhhh, ahhh.
Be cool, baby girl,
Torn up soul
silence the howl till you are the source
Be the force
Olympian sport
Sisyphean task, to forgive yourself
Sip this hermetic font till you drink your mind pure
Leave the train, ride the railsÂ
TILL YOU BUILD
an amphitheatre of strays and strobe trailsÂ
Go astray, chasin immortality,
lose anonymity, disassociate,
They will say you break
but you just break Everything you make
Awake away - the TARNISHed knife to your heart,
no warrior sword, dancing dreaming peace and love in,
Billboard star blind, birdsong DJ, storm hunting packs of proto clown uniforms,
battlefields===Â
act like glass, class a knife, drag down ladders stairs, you got the pole wrong,Â
risk everything to find authenticity Â
In armies of Playmobil straight arms,Â
out
of control, outsideÂ
of you,Â
Splash in pleasuredome pools, till you hit your tracks. Which you will.
Wave goodbye to decency, this poverty of self-esteem, pins badges to light ashen hearts:
Gods, totems, Centre Court Them, not You…oooo,oooo, ooo.
Run away, turn away, sell your soul, for sale
SELL YOUR SOUL - FOR SALE
Luxury, luxury, luxury
Spin around, thrown around, run around, fronting wardrobe, Secrets of Escape, destitute. (Hold yourself, fight through.)
Give it up, destroy boundaries, take temptation, pestilence, avarice
Till you become your own, again, yeah huh.
Pylon eye, red light, demon wrestle in ripples of City Other, yeah yeah
No parish, bar, bench, can help break your prison walls, No, no, no, nooooo
Double-vulnerability,
Raise your heights.
No safety on the ground, the land, you’ll never own
levity of cosmos, skies are who you are, in oblivion,
as the shores roll
sink to dive, shaking, long ago
Pen to paper is the best for you.
Save yourself, your soul, as you lose it all. Yeah huh.
Scattered, survival mode, white noise chaos, spectacle of crash and burn,
Meme hating yourself, for likes,
or fall into the claws of deadly nightshade and burn out. Fade away
Yeah, huh.
Smalltown why you not feel bigtown!
Stress kills, magnetise your spirit girl!
Circles of ponds, parties, lakes, clubs, abyss of digital reality gangs, future tech, success obsess, can you leave again, huh huh huh yeah…
Data, image, fit in, to find the ones you’ll leave behind.
No cosmic unity, divinity, dawns raise as moths fly to urine pesticide
Gen Anxiety credits what was stolen.
Lean in, small catch, hand-held coercion scatters self-worth,Â
caring more for It and Then. Yes.
REMEMBER DON’T RELIVE, PARTING GIFT
Rot away, rot away, burn out exposed, naked, baby girl
Close your eyes, kill the pain, shadow soul
Luxury Luxury Luxury
Naked on the stage, publicly
Spotlight every opportunity for which you thought you were made
GILT HELICOPTER EAGLE - SOLO STARLING SKIDDING, Chasing tai chi Crowleys, Cinderella, Cleopatra, happy ever after, bliss
Scrape the barrel, in a well of tears
Get me out of here
EGO WANNABE TILL YOU ARE FREE
All the hurt makes holes for you to climb out
PATINA ALABASTER
Never go back to coping living hard,
Throw rocks of Their flightPATH
Starlink RADIO DISRUPTOR
Surf on peaks of Underworld white horse cheekbone light,
Drown in this beauty of not being a part of It, girl.
Blow away, lose all, Yeah huh.
Label, victim, PERSECUTE, RESCUE, work out where you’ve been
Come away, fractured, broken BEACON (of your own expectation)
Heal the First Act threads
In your mountain CAVE
Write the past BEHIND YOU
palm tree JOY is in your heart.
Be kind, let yourself cry, it’s safe, no apologies.
Luxury, luxury, luxury.