Hold Your Own (6 page)
Authors: Kate Tempest
The sentences that strangers say.
A child having fun.
Daylight on a dozing man.
A damp patch on the ceiling.
Anything can shake his hands
and flood his soul with feeling.
And it’s worth all the agony,
the wanting to be
more
for that fickle ecstasy
when he knows what he’s for.
That burning punch from paradise
eternal in the moment.
When it’s good it’s very good,
the rest is all atonement.
It was something about the shape of his face
the size of him. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
I just wanted him to know without me saying
that I needed him to put me in my place.
We were joking, all together, shooting pool.
I was standing, legs apart, smoking fags and swearing.
Beside me, with their slender waists and shipwreck eyes
the girls were dancing, and I was dying
to be like them; until one put her breasts
against my body and my feelings changed.
The days, the days they break to fade.
What fills them I’ll forget.
Every touch and smell and taste.
This sun, about to set
can never last. It breaks my heart.
Each joy feels like a threat:
Although there’s beauty everywhere,
its shadow is regret.
Still, something in the coming dusk
whispers not to fret.
Don’t matter that we’ll lose today.
It’s not tomorrow yet.
What you don’t know is that
I’ve written this poem a hundred times,
scribbled it over countless takeaway menus and flyers for shit raves
in the only pen I could ever find,
which was always a miniature turquoise rollerball.
I’ve found scraps of it in my pockets
and set fire to it on fifteen different windowsills.
And watched the wind catch the ashes
and each time blow them back in my face.
I write it, and imagine giving it to you,
and I get so scared that you will shake your head
and tell me you can’t trust a word I say
that I screw it up really small
and wedge it down the back of the bus seats
with the chicken bones.
Let it be known: no man is entirely alone
No man is a man all through.
I’ve seen you. Shivering. Fleeting weakness.
Cold rain scuffing its feet on the beaches.
Young human. You. All feeling, flesh.
Brine eyes. Man, but human first.
Stand up. Tall and strong and curved.
Your body makes my body hurt.
A godkid. Perfect. Gloss and dirt.
None of it’s real, we are made manifest
By the hearts that bang hard on the bars of our chests –
Let them out.
But we can’t though. Too much to lose.
You’ve got to keep face, keep pace. Keep cool.
And what do I know? You’re the man here.
I’ve got to stop telling you things.
You’ll give when you’re ready.
I’ve got to stop wanting.
Your mind’s made up.
I’ve got to stop pushing.
You’re trying to keep steady.
No man’s too man to hear things.
No tears no tantrums. Resorting to type. So handsome.
No woman’s too woman to take it all in.
Quietly solve it, not try and control it,
But fix it so subtle that no one will notice.
Be all that you are, all woman all soft.
All man. All soft. All flesh. All bone. All organ.
I find you more than yourself. I hear you talk to yourself in the night-time.
But don’t worry, I won’t say a word to your friends.
Your voice. Your tears. Your cries. Your panic.
You are more man when you break and weep.
When you shake and sleep,
Body wrapped around your pillow
Safer than a body that bites back.
Your billowing shirt as you sprint through the dirt. Night cap.
One for the road. But the road never loved you.
I love you. I love what you hate in yourself.
It’s perfect.
Let it come out.
The best boys would feel like a lady in your arms.
The best girls would fuck like a man, given half the chance.
The good ones are good ones because they are whole ones.
We’re at our best when we mean it.
We all start part of a much bigger notion.
And lock ourselves down like we don’t have a say.
We come from man and woman combined
And we’ll carry those parts till we see our last day.
Hear me. Let it be known.
Your muscles are mine, let’s stretch.
Dawn by the bins. We giggle and wretch –
The dawn’s on your skin. You’re shivering, wet.
You’ll cry from your pores if not from your eyes.
Your blood’s the same colour as mine.
What a man ever was is enough. It’s enough.
Stop trying. Give everything up. No shame here.
No woman’s too woman to stand tall and strong.
No man’s too man to want loving. Need guidance.
All hearts shrink before violence.
All fists clench for their friends.
We’re from here.
We carry it.
Everything that ever went wrong here.
Every single body that gave in.
Caved in.
Break through the boards in the windows.
Find a man thinner than string.
Blinking.
Trying to keep everything in.
Foul smell of the things that we do to escape
There is no glamour in this. No rock and roll.
This is just endings. This is just grief.
And you’ve got a soul worth living for.
I’m blocking blows for you. But I can’t protect you.
I’m too slow for you.
I’m too alive to be near all this death.
I love you. I will not walk off.
But each time my heart falls out of my chest
And sits there, knees pulled up to its chest
It strikes me that there’s hardly anything left.
For all of the things that we learnt in this city.
For all of the things that it taught.
You are more than the last pair of trainers you bought.
Never just one thing.
We’re all things.
But all things fall short.
A man is a man when he clings to his friends.
A woman’s a woman when she holds it down.
A man is a man who takes up her cauldron.
A woman’s a woman who takes up his crown.
And wears it for all the right reasons.
And stirs it for all the right reasons.
Humans.
Born with the bodies that need to release.
Find me inside you.
Let me be all that I am.
Tiresias. Wringing my hands.
Tiresias. Singing the hymns of the land.
T
IRESIAS
: Where’s the glory, killing the dead twice over?
– Sophocles,
Antigone
So after all that.
Three lifetimes behind you,
And just at the moment you’ve found some peace,
You are dragged before the gods,
No mention of the lives you’ve lived.
The things you’ve learned to cultivate, like
Living in the moment.
You’d be angry if you weren’t so resigned
To letting nothing take you by surprise any longer.
That first dark journey.
Begging your feet to carry you somewhere you might recognise the smell of.
The whole world spinning within you.
A darkness. You can’t get a breath.
The howling of Hera still sharp in your ears
The feeling of godsized palms on your forehead,
The sudden nausea that trampled your body.
When your eyes began to fog, it was just spots of dark at first,
Expanding out.
Until nothing. Straining to see round the edge of the smudge, through the middle or something. Pushing,
But nothing.
While within, another sight, another sense is growing.
Some lightness somewhere.
A feeling of certainty.
The ache of a purpose. The fear. The crippling doubt.
Here it comes.
Your Daddy is a soldier son,
Your Daddy’s gone to War,
His steady hands they hold his gun,
His aim is keen and sure.
Your Daddy’s in the desert now,
The darkness and the dust,
He’s fighting for his country, yes,
He’s doing it for us.
Your Daddy’s coming home soon though,
Not long now till he’s back,
We’ll dress you in your smartest shirt
And meet him down the track.
He’ll put you on his shoulders and
You’ll sing and clap and laugh,
I’ll wrap my arms around his waist,
And hold him close at last.
Your Dad ain’t left the house again,
Your Dad ain’t brushed his teeth,
Your Dad keeps getting angry son,
At nights he doesn’t sleep.
He’s having his bad dreams again,
He seems worn out and weak,
I’ve tried to be there for him, but
We barely even speak.
He can’t think what to say to me,
He don’t know how to tell it,
Won medals for his bravery,
But just wants to forget it.
He’s drinking more than ever son,
Before, he never cried.
But now, I wake at night and feel
Him shaking by my side.
He spoke to me at last my son!
He turned to me in tears,
I held him close and kissed his face
And asked him what he feared.
He said
it’s getting darker,
It hasn’t disappeared,
And
I can see it sharper
Now the sand and smoke have cleared
.
There was this kid he’d got to know,
Young boy. Just turned eighteen,
Bright and kind, his name was Joe,
He kept his rifle clean.
Joe’s girlfriend was expecting,
Joe loved to joke and laugh,
Joe marched in front of your old man,
As they patrolled a path.
Everything was quiet until
They heard the dreaded blast.
The man that marched in front of Joe
Was completely blown apart.
Some shrapnel hit Joe in the face,
Gouged both eyes at once,
The last thing those eyes ever saw
Was the man in front:
Limbs and flesh and bone and blood,
Torn up and thrown around,
And after that – just blackness.
The taste, the stink, the sound.
I tell you this my son because
I know what you’ll be like,
As soon as you’ve grown old enough
You’ll want to go and fight
In whatever battle needs you,
You’ll pledge your blood and bone,
Not in the name of good or evil –
But in the name of home.
Your Dad believes in fighting.
He fights for you and I,
But the men that send the armies in
Will never hear him cry.
I don’t support the war my son,
I don’t believe it’s right,
But I do support the soldiers who
Go off to war to fight.
Troops just like your daddy son,
Soldiers through and through,
Who wear their uniform with pride,
And do what they’re told to do.
When you’re grown, my sweet, my love,
Please don’t go fighting wars,
But fight the men that start them
Or fight a cause that’s yours.
It seems so full of honour, yes,
So valiant, so bold,
But the men that send the armies in
Send them in for gold,
Or they send them in for oil,
And they tell us it’s for Britain
But the men come home like Daddy,
And spend their days just drinking.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by payment plans
Once there was a purpose,
so I hear: there was a God.
It made it all less worthless
and it gave us the because
we’d all been searching for.
An unarguable truth.
A reason to be kind and just,
a reason for the noose
that sent the sinner off to sinnerland
and made us all feel better
in the knowledge that the righteous
would be right and just forever.
Once there was religion, and it ruled.
We had it bad.
We fooled ourselves to sleep at night;
This was This, and That was That.
And if our morals ever shook,
we looked no further than The Book.
But over time we felt the pressure;