Hold Your Own by Kate Tempest Read Free Book Online Page A

numbness.
    It’s much safer, safety’s so appealing
     
    And what’s wrong with wanting comforts?
    My family are worth protecting.
    Why should I concern myself with people that I’ve never met?
    And no one’s got my back, so why should I have theirs?
    My heart throws its head against my ribs,
    It’s denting every bone it’s venting something it has known since I arrived and felt it beat.

Party time
    He’s drunk tonight.
    He can’t bear another moment
    of all day committed to a calling
    he never asked for.
     
    He’s singing at the roof tops.
    Nobody is listening.
    He is the old crazy walking into parked cars.
     
    If he sees you strolling home with your arms around each other
    he will shout wildly at you and you will smirk knowingly, while you try and shake the terror that he’s airing your most secret dread.
     
    That deep, raw bark is his calling.
    Even tanked up like this, he can’t put it out.
     
    Tonight, you see him at a party,
    jabbing the air with his fingers,
    some kid picked him up on the way over.
    Thought it would be funny.
     
    He stands smiling into ears and necks,
    dancing like the ancients used to.
    But there will come an hour when the dawn is nearly dressed,
    when he will start to sway with purpose
    and all the laughing kids will hold their sides
    and find each other’s eyes, like have you seen this guy ? !
    While he bows his head and makes his incantations,
    singing like a rabbi.
     
    He’s summoning their destinies,
    sentencing their spirits;
    poor things, the joke’s on them –
    they think he’s rapping lyrics.

Prophet
    See him, the old man, blind as our greed,
    Alone in the caff with his meat and his gravy.
    Witness to every great nation that rose up in hope
    And fell prey to itself. This is slavery .
    Is that what he says to himself? Was it maybe
    A mumble that meant something else? Was it baby
    I miss you ? He gets up slow from the table.
    Gripping his cane so he’s able.
     
    Shuffling, lonesome, sipping black lager,
    Park-drunk. Spouting maniacal laughter.
    Hard up. Head down. Scarf, gloves, parka.
    Every other bastard with a half-arsed grasp on the last judgement is sitting in his bathtub
    clasping his palms. Each night got his guard up so far that he can’t dance till he’s half-cut.
    No damn charm, all they want is to be martyrs.
    He spits brown phlegm at the oncoming darkness.
     
    He ridicules grandeur
    He understands squalor.
    Cake for breakfast.
    He can do what he likes.
    If these are the last days,
    They’re no more fast-paced
    Than all of the other
    Last days and nights.
     
    Buzzwords everywhere. Progress. Freedom.
    He picks his teeth with a dirty needle
    And kicks his feet to the latest jingles.
    Ain’t got no time to be dating singles.
    Far too busy trying to make things simple.
    This old tribe ain’t nothing special.
    All my life I’ve watched men wrestle,
    Stealing land to fly their flags.
    He keeps his eyes in a plastic bag.
     
    He keeps his eyes in a plastic bag.

Acknowledgements
    Huge thanks to Becky Thomas, Don Paterson and all at Picador.
     
    ‘Ballad of a hero’ was originally commissioned by Tongue Fu for The Space and appeared on thespace.org under the name War Music (after Logue).
     
    ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’ is a line from Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’.
    Extract from ‘How To Be A Great Writer’ from Love is a Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski (Ecco Books) © The Charles Bukowski Estate.

Also by Kate Tempest
     
     
    Brand New Ancients

Copyright © 2014 by Kate Tempest
     
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