Phoenix (2019)

I’m playing a social experiment with myself.
It goes like this:
hold your head up high,
hold your spine straighter.
Being bent doesn’t mean
you have to bend to their agenda,
wear your queerness as a weapon.
Don’t let people tell you it’s a weakness,
it’s your armour,
the place you rest your head at night
light streaming through the gaps in your curtains
restless dawns but

I fight back against the thunderstorms.

I face lightning and ground it in between my feet
soft knees a shoulder widths apart,
and hey,
if it takes Davina McCall to motivate me through those squats so be it.
I’ve decided to redecorate
and build my walls up stronger,
stand on top of them instead of cowering behind cos
everything feels lighter at the top of the mountain.
And the climb is always worth it,
the strain at the back of your legs
can remind you of how far you’ve come, 
and fresh water from the falls
can taste 

like freedom.

Some poems are born from fire
bursting forth from an inner furnace
ignited from a fleeting genius.
Others begin as a lump in the throat,
words gradually growing from the tonsils
til one day they fall out.
And the only thing I’ll birth is poems
and that’s quite alright with me,
I sort through the placenta of spare syllables and
spear the phrases that sing to me.
I tell myself it’s ok
not to perform
while I grow myself from ashes,
a Scorpio phoenix through and through
hued from London concrete
via Yorkshire slate,
but refusing to turn myself
to stone.

I thank Black feminism
and femmes always, 
always for teaching me how to stay soft
in a world so full of hate,
how there is strength in what is perceived to be weak,
how you are nothing without your community
how unity is never far away
but still so far away
from the Union Jack,
how jacked up the world can be but still find hope

in holding hands.

So I try
to make myself vulnerable,
make myself more humbled,
make myself keep walking though I stumble,
fumbling through this learning and unlearning,
yearning for a future
where walls are broken down along our borders,
and hearts can connect 
without these barriers.