by Kate Tempest
It doesn’t matter.
If our kids are fine
That’s enough for us
You can’t love into a vacuum.
There’s got to be a limit.
Welcome to the biggest crime that’s ever been committed
You think you and I are different kinds?
You’re caught up in specifics.
You and I apart are easier to limit.
The illusion’s so complete
it’s impossible to bring it into focus.
Cinematic stock footage:
people are locusts.
Uniformed men keep unleashing explosives.
What we gonna do to
wake up?
We sleep so deep
it don’t matter how they shake us.
If we can’t face it
we can’t escape it.
But tonight the storms come.
Tunnel vision
tunnel vision
Work drinks. Heartbreak.
Can’t face the past, the past’s a dark place.
Can’t sleep.
Can’t wake.
Sitting in our boxes
Notching up our victories
as other people’s losses.
Another day another chance to turn your face away from pain
Let’s get a takeaway
Meet me in the pub a little later
say the same things as ever
Life’s a waiting game
When we gonna see that life is happening?
And that every single body
bleeding on its knees
is an abomination?
All things are, in their way, communicating.
We’re just sparks
tiny parts
of a bigger constellation.
Minuscule molecules
that make up one body
The tragedy and pain
of a person that you’ve never met
is present in your nightmares,
in your pull towards
despair
The sickness of the culture
and the sickness in our hearts
is a sickness that’s inflicted
by the distance
that we share.
It was our bombs that started this war.
It rages at a distance,
so we dismiss all its victims as strangers,
but they’re parents and children
made dogs by the danger.
Existence is Futile so we don’t engage.
It was our boats that sailed,
killed, stole and made frail
it was our boots that stamped
it was our courts that jailed
and it was our fucking banks that got bailed.
It was us who turned bleakly away,
looked back down at our nails and our wedding plans
in the face of a force 10 gale
we said it’s not up to us to make this place a better land.
It’s not up to us to make this place
a better land
Justice
Justice
Recompense
Humility
Trust is
trust is something we will never see
Till Love is unconditional
The myth of the individual
Has left us disconnected lost
and pitiful.
I’m out in the rain
it’s a cold night in London
Screaming at my loved ones
to wake up and love more.
Pleading with my loved ones to
wake up
and love more.
A Note on the Author
KATE TEMPEST was born in London in 1985. Her work includes the plays Wasted, Glasshouse and Hopelessly Devoted; the poetry collections Everything Speaks in its Own Way and Hold Your Own; the albums Balance, Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos; the long poem Brand New Ancients; and the novel The Bricks that Built the Houses. She was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for Everybody Down, and received the Ted Hughes Award and a Herald Angel award for Brand New Ancients.
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First published by Picador in 2016
First U.S. edition 2017
© Kate Tempest, 2017
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ISBN: PB: 978-1-63286-877-0
ePub: 978-1-63286-878-7
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