Hold Your Own by Kate Tempest Read Free Book Online

won’t help us feed our kids.
     
    Our eyes are trained on pinpricks in the blackness.
    The telly helps to end a dismal day.
    The visions come when we are at our weakest.
    But they don’t last that long, so it’s ok.

Cruise control
    The weather will change,
    We’ll think it malicious.
    Speak hurricanes’ names and worry in secret.
    The waves will build somewhere way out in the ocean,
    And flatten whole towns when they break on the beaches.
     
    It won’t be enough. We’ll plough on
    The mightiest we’ve ever been.
    Standing like gods on the shoulders of history.
    Or tossing our curls in the sun.
     
    We’ll stare down at the screens in our hands
    And smile at the photos. Didn’t we laugh.
    Strange voices will sing from street corners.
    Powerful men will mumble it into the backs
    Of the people they fuck. This is the end.
     
    Health and safety slogans will resonate like ancient proverbs.
    Don’t use the lifts in the case of fire.
    Make yourself aware of your nearest exit.
    We’ll bury our heads in the sand of our lovers.
     
    The waters will boil in the oceans.
    Dead things will float on the waves.
    The ice caps will thicken to slush puppies
    As hurricanes twist
    Like boxers in sleeping bags, trying to throw punches.
     
    There’ll be fires in the forests, floods in the cities.
    And men too rich to swim will die.
    The skin on our children will toughen and harden.
    And still we will debase ourselves
    For that piece of land or mineral
    That rock or bomb or golden egg
    That might allow one dying person to imagine
    They are worth more than another.

And as we followed dinosaurs
    Whatever follows us
    Will hunt for footprints in the lowlands,
    And piece together fragments of our habits
    From the internet.
     
    A fossilised smartphone preserved behind glass
    For the new young to traipse past on school trips,
    Yawning.

Radical empathy
    I feel a peace beyond these fumes.
    It’s coming. I can feel it surging.
    Drumming on the curbs, it’s burning up,
    It’s gaining ground.
     
    A peace that we are born deserving.
    One we learn to think absurd.
    It’s in us, or at least, the yearning.
    Quickly, stamp it down.
     
    It must be getting nearer.
    We can feel it shake within us.
    While the echo of each violence done
    Pulls out our teeth and breaks our fingers.
     
    Each time you walk the street and flinch
    At shadows, see a demon coming,
    Visualise your body falling
    Under trains or into nothing,
    Every time you sense a figure
    Running for you, grabbing hold,
    To beat you down and leave you dying,
    Rob you blind and leave you cold –
     
    It’s not the fear or the desire to fall.
    It’s a memory.
    Each wrong is repeated relentlessly.
    All thought is eternal.
    All life is empathy.
     
    The streets are thick with everything that’s ever happened anywhere.
    Feel it in the presence of the crowds.
    Shouting in your ears when you are bowed and in tears.
    It’s here.
    We can turn our backs forever but we’ll never drown it out.
     
    Every time a body’s bled its last,
    A child dead before it’s learned that life is fast,
    It stays behind, repeating.
    You say you feel the monsters in the dark,
    They are not monsters,
    They are memories of human things that need to be addressed, appeased.
     
    But there is peace, not heralded by muted brass or soaring strings,
    Not worried by the children necking fizzy drinks and sticky wings.
    But in us, throbbing, telling us we resolutely must
    Not partake in one more horror
    If we’re to learn to trust.
     
    Fine enough for poets, but in real life
    The blood is flowing.
    Fine enough to know it,
    But it feels like
    The love is slowing down,
    Getting tired. Cannot lift its weary head.
    And all of it continues.
    And still nothing can be said.
     
    We are not hateful creatures,
    We are good. Our goodness screams for peace.
    Everything that’s happened can be felt.
    Each mouth deserves to speak
    Whichever words come to it in the throes of truthful feeling.
    But instead
    We plunge to