Hold Your Own (3 page)
Authors: Kate Tempest
The cruelty of the sun that burns above
And you offer only toothless grins
For all that you have seen.
Tiresias, you hold your own.
Each you that you have been.
You walk among us, slow,
A ragged crow,
With breath to blow,
In which we’ll see a truth
That we’ll wish we didn’t know.
You’re the crazy on the corner
Old, and smelling weird
Queuing for electric
With birdbones in your beard.
You stagger on regardless,
Swaying in the street
Summoning an oracle
That can’t be arsed to meet.
While we assemble selves online
And stare into our phones,
You are bright and terrifying,
Breath and flesh and bone.
Tiresias – you teach us
What it means: to hold your own.
T
IRESIAS
: You long for knowledge;
you will soon long for ignorance.
– Euripides,
The Phoenician Women
I hold you in my arms,
your age is told in months.
There’s things I hope you’ll learn.
Things I’m sure that I learned once.
But there’s nothing I can teach you.
You’ll find all that you need.
No flower bends its head to offer
teaching to a seed.
The seed will grow and blossom
once the flower’s ground to dust.
But even so, if nothing else,
one thing I’ll entrust:
Doing what you please
is not the same
as doing what you must.
It roars. Precious and hot and before time.
We played games on the alleyway railing.
I was the fat one. Good-natured and kind.
They were my friends. The world was our plaything.
We climbed hills to bury things. We drew maps.
Pulled our feet from the suck of the Quaggy.
Rules were if you flinched they got two free slaps.
My specs were large and my clothes were baggy.
Collected things that we found on the ground.
Always the goalie. I never complained.
I told the stories; they did the sounds.
We painted potatoes whenever it rained.
I was walking my dog in the park.
He ran down to the wooded bit where I wasn’t allowed on my own
and I followed him, calling.
I was a kind-hearted child. I’d run across the road to save a spider.
I glimpsed the top of his tail and clapped my hands.
I found him!
He was sniffing another dog.
The other dog was sat beside a couple lying down.
They didn’t have their clothes on.
I dropped to my haunches to talk about dogs.
He was above her.
His elbows dug into the grass.
She was scowling at me,
her hair was long and sweaty.
They were wrapped in a cream blanket.
I stroked their dog.
Asked for his name.
Explained that some of my best friends were animals.
He told me to Fuck off.
It was the first time I’d heard it.
He hissed it full of venom and his eyes were black as 8balls.
I was seven,
my neighbour was eight.
She stuffed a pair of socks down my pants
and straddled me and called me big boy.
I didn’t have a clue what it meant
but I’ve been dizzy on that feeling ever since.
The boys have football and skate ramps.
They can ride BMX
and play basketball in the courts by the flats until midnight.
The girls have shame.
One day,
when we are grown and we have minds of our own,
we will be kind women, with nice smiles and families and jobs.
And we will sit,
with the weight of our lives and our pain
pushing our bodies down into the bus seats,
and we will see thirteen-year-old girls for what will seem like the first
time since we’ve been them,
and they will be sitting in front of us, laughing
into their hands at our shoes or our jackets,
and rolling their eyes at each other.
While out of the window, in the sunshine,
the boys will be cheering each other on,
and daring each other to jump higher and higher.
I was sat beside her on the bench.
It was lunchtime and the boys were all playing football.
The girls sat on benches beside the field
and watched the boys.
Every now and then she’d grunt and say things like
cor I wouldn’t mind having him
She’d had her period,
she said it was like being sick out your minge.
And she’d been fingered
and she had spots
and she knew swearwords
and she had boobs
and she gave blowjobs.
Before I had music and rhyming,
I was too big and I walked like a boy,
and I was too soft for the school that I went to
and I was too smart and it made her suspicious.
I had to be tenderised.
In the changing room,
girls sprayed so much Innocence it made the air toxic to breathe,
and brushed each other’s hair
and sang pop songs.
The bully would point at my crotch
and ask what I had.
And I wouldn’t understand
but I would blush and blush and blush.
Her sidekick was skinny and not very smart
and had hair like a short lampshade
and every time a boy walked past the bully would shout
shut your legs you minger,
I can smell your dirty fanny
and the sidekick would stare at the ground.
Their mothers had been friends since they were at school.
We wander into school, happy children;
kind and bright and interested in things.
We don’t yet know the horrors of the building.
The hatred it will teach. The boredom it will bring.
Soon we’ll learn to disappear in public.
We’ll learn that getting by is good enough.
We’ll learn the way it feels to see injustice,
and shut our mouths in case it comes for us.
We’ll learn to never think but copy blindly.
To ally with the mean and keep them near.
We’ll learn to not be talented or clever,
and the most important lessons
for success in a career:
How to follow orders when you’re bordering
on nausea and you’re bored
and insecure and dwarfed by fear.
They think we’re bad kids.
We have nothing but fury and bass
and dead friends that keep us close to each other.
We’re tied to our fate like it’s mythical.
But nothing is certain.
I’m a talented thief.
I push trolley loads of fancy booze out the doors of Tesco’s
with a smiling nonchalance that makes me famous.
My family are worried.
Me and my dad are fighting with our hands.
My sisters can’t reach me.
I’ve stopped coming home at night.
I’ve dropped out of school to sit around and laugh at people.
Waiting in the pool room for the Triad with the coke,
walking through the rain with a bar of hash strapped to my chest,
I feel like punching every stranger in the face.
My friends pass me the laughing gas.
When other kids throw parties, they hope that we won’t come.
When I meet her, she is just like me.
I wake before her and start drinking.
She sees me at the foot of her bed,
smoking skunk out of her window,
watching all the chaos come to life below us.
And she whispers things I’ve never heard a person say.
When we walk down the street holding hands
grown men stuff theirs down their jeans and stare openly.
Groups of boys follow us to ask her why she’s with me.
When we stand kissing at a party,
a man we’ve never met
grips the back of both our heads
and sticks his tongue into our mouths.
When the rumours start
I don’t believe them.
Before her there were things that I trusted.
But now there is a loneliness so deep it sends me foetal.
And dark endless raves where she makes us both a spectacle
and all I want are the friends I’ve lost,
the certainty of knowing I have nothing.
A circle. Shoulders and hard chests and arms like rosary beads
from push-ups before bed, eyes narrowed.
We wear our hoods up. We talk in couplets.
Two lines at a time and my heart has
never been calmer than here,
in the cypher.
I stare at my trainers and listen to deep voices
throwing out lyrics through smoke.
I know I can do this much better than them.
I can feel it. Something like stillness,
but nothing like stillness.
It creeps up my throat like water creeps down it.
It spreads itself over my tongue.
My shoulders are squared.
I move like the boys,
I talk like the boys,
but my words are my own.
And when I unleash them, my eyes widen and focus.
The streetlights stop flickering, just for a moment,
the arrogance prickles like sweat at my temples,
I’m moving as if I have never been gentle.
The kinder among them look at me sideways.
Smiling, shaking their heads,
I feel it all through me.
It’s shaking my legs.
I push my fist against theirs, my soft arms are clasped,
I’m embraced like a man, my back slapped,
and my heart all the time getting faster.
The beatboxer nods his respect
.
And I’m feeling bigger than
all of these buildings.
I wait for my turn again,
everything burning.
Age is a pervert. Youth is a fascist
Youth hates age, age loves youth.
This means we are born for unhappiness.
This means we will keep buying outfits.
Youth, in his hard-bodied, glistening bullshit
stares at the sagging mouths of his elders
and feels utter disgust and it makes him annoyed.
Why aren’t they ashamed of themselves?
His youth is his victory, he wins every day that he’s young.
He beats people up when he’s bored.
He sniffs cheap drugs and plays with his balls in the classroom.
He can’t stand ugly people.
When he steps out onto the street,
everyone is speaking his language.
He feels like the first to have ever done anything.
Age stares with dismay at Youth.
He’d shared that same air once
but now, he stands alone on the high street,
his glasses steamed up,
pulling his saggy pants out of his arsecrack.
When he thinks back, his entire life is movie stills.
He watches the arrogant arc of that young skull,
the swing of those young limbs and feels his guts drop.
If he could hold something young
just for a few good strokes
Watch him, kicking a tennis ball,
keeping it up,
the boy on the street in his sister’s old jumper.
Watch him,
absorbed in the things that he does.
Crouched down,
observing the worms and the slugs.
He’s shaping their journeys
placing his leaves in their paths,
playing with fate.
Godcub.
Sucking on sherbet.
Riding his bike in the sunlight.
Filmic.
Perfect.
But one day
he’ll be hunch-backed, riddled with pain.
Desperate for love but too weak to enjoy it.
Mumbling at strangers on trains,
how strange
that when we have youth we’re so keen to destroy it.
We do not choose
but follow blindly.
We do not own
just sometimes carry.
We do not make.
We undertake
to be more alive
each day we wake.
And this is a must.
And the days are all dust
and the only thing worse
than losing the trust
of a lover is finding the rust
in their kiss.
He will live longer than all of his passions.