Hold Your Own: Poems

by Kae Tempest

Tiresias, you hold your own. Each you that you have been.

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.

How to follow orders when you’re bordering on nausea and you’re bored and insecure and dwarfed by fear.

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.

How many yous have you been? How many, Lined up inside, Each killing the last?

How many times have you Seen yourself change, Felt yourself splitting in half? When does it happen? There in the moment? Or when you look back and say – that’s when my changing began?

I opened the window, blew my smoke into the night, passionately drunk. In love with two women and playing charming as hard as I could.

In my head I was listening to Chopin and I was reading Joyce and I was in love with them for being so human and for saying it all so well.

Getting by is fine for some But she was after better luck.

How many of us must we be?

The boy in her is strong some days And calls out for a girl to touch The girl in her is full of rage And craves the things she hates so much.

Watching his body like it wasn’t his. He pushed his new shape to the edge of the clearing.

He journeyed for days, until he was purified.

He learned to forget his hurt and regret he walked on his own, legs like two flames.

And he saw then: no matter how far you have come, you can never be further than right where you are.

Language lives when you speak it. Let it be heard.

Poetry trembles alone, only picked up to be taken apart.

Sometimes things are as simple as they seem.

The world is a terrible place for sensitive people but the closer we come to losing our minds, the harder we’ll work to keep them.

It’s ok to feel alone. Usually you are. That’s what poetry’s for.

You’ve only yourself to blame when someone half as talented as you ends up achieving twice as much.

If you want to know your worth, ask your lovers. Especially the ones who don’t talk to you anymore. You can’t be a good person and treat your lovers badly, no matter how much you give to charity.

If you’ve been an arsehole today, acknowledge it. Try not to be one tomorrow.

Never underestimate how nice it is to make someone a cup of tea without them having to ask.

If you have a shit job and you don’t love your girlfriend and your life is killing you, take a fucking risk for once. If some people don’t hate your work, you’re not doing it right.

You taught me what a body’s for. Before you I was scared of being stripped completely naked even in the throes of it.

Ideas are such perfect things. But soon as they’re made real they’re cringing, clunky, turgid things, so difficult to wield.

And it’s worth all the agony, the wanting to be more for that fickle ecstasy when he knows what he’s for.

This sun, about to set can never last. It breaks my heart.

I love you. I love what you hate in yourself.

I’m too alive to be near all this death.

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.

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.

I’ve tried to be there for him, but We barely even speak.

He said it’s getting darker, It hasn’t disappeared, And I can see it sharper Now the sand and smoke have cleared.

Your Dad believes in fighting. He fights for you and I,

But the men that send the armies in Will never hear him cry.

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

Without the fear of retribution we found guilt-free pleasure but we lost the sense of union that had kept us all together.

The dream of getting rich enough to live outside the common life.

We used to burn women who had epileptic fits. We’d tie them to a stake and proclaim them a witch. Now we’ll put them on a screen if they’ve got nice tits, but they’ll be torn apart if they let themselves slip.

The world is your playground, go and get your kicks, as long as you’re not poor, or ugly, or sick.

All I could see in flickering, ultraviolet pixels Were their great-grandchildren ripped to pieces by the missiles

Please don’t bother raising arms to shoot us, we’ll shoot ourselves. No really, we insist.

No guns. Just give us brands and bills and wages, and rent that takes our dignity away. Don’t trouble yourselves with handcuffs and with cages. There’s cleaner ways than that to make us pay.

The mightiest we’ve ever been. Standing like gods on the shoulders of history.

Whichever words come to it in the throes of truthful feeling. But instead We plunge to numbness. It’s much safer, safety’s so appealing

He’s summoning their destinies, sentencing their spirits; poor things, the joke’s on them – they think he’s rapping lyrics.