Like trying to speak

Crack a shell into many pieces and toss the salt stained flesh to the sea light

The debris gathers on the sand waiting for high tide to tidy the violence up

Swirling patterns tornado the mind’s eye

I look for fissures on the film of the calcified armour

to apply pressure with my crooked fingers and rip them apart.

All this because I wanted to open with the word crack

then these words followed,

came out of the chaos of my void like brain

to rest on the white page as though it were deliberate.

A long drawn out discordant organ sound purges the atmosphere of nonsense

a desperate antenna searches for something to settle on.

Many moths rest on the floor

How long does anything last.

Keep going

Insist on something

For something is everything that struggles to exist

To live in the suffocating smog of the city

The squeeze and the speed and the concrete horizons

Indifference permeates everything and takes the yells from my mouth

We are sleepwalking

We are sleepwalking and talking about the football again

The world won’t end it will just get much worse

Harder, crueller, scarier unless more people start creating and converging

And leading

And boy they had better be better than me

Only that isn’t it, is it

There are no heroes

We just have each other

So let’s not settle for gibberish or time wasting

Let us chant the truth

Temperatures are rising

Species are dying

Ice caps are melting

Lets not stay with classroom science

For this is happening too fast and it is so much more than I am bothering to capture

I’m too panicked to do a good job

Imagining a future looking for food

Fighting for food

Old wounds enraged

Warmongering and lies reign

Picking out make do shelters from the debris of our homes

Picking out dead bodies

Having to move house to escape the water

and join the throng of marching homeless

Through the heat and embers of our dreams

 

And I guess this is to my daughter now she has arrived

And cracked the shell of my heart open

Discarding me on the beach of meaning

Longing to make everything right for her

So she can breathe the air and kiss the light

Not hide from it

 

Yes, my daughter you were born just as the world leaders parted ways

And the commentary intensified

Some leaders returned to oil the wheels of a suicidal kind of progress

Other leaders went back to shed tears and shake with rage

Along with the people of their betrayed countries.

Onslaught after onslaught, a terrible kind of waiting

You waited for the meetings to end and my trust in power to receive its death blow

Tracing it back that happened about the same time Bezos took the podium

And I saw he spoke an alien’s language

You waited for it to all finish and the leaders to fly home

As if you knew our hope was not to be found in what they would vomit out

But somehow instead by us coming together and entering the flow

Those endless words left me numb

The most beautiful and truthful were ignored

So you emerging sleek and wailing was a timely lesson in wonder

And the most profound challenge

Can I hold your gaze?

I am not the person to write about the shortcoming of another climate conference

All I know is that in the first month of your life

The weather is unseasonably warm  

In some places dangerously so

Enough to stop food growing and kill

And Thwaite’s glacier is cracking open  

Is all this too abstract to galvanise anything other than feverish writing?

 

And listen, who is this to? I said its to my daughter yet I want people to read this and engage now

Before she even learns to read. Please.

And when should I show her this kind of outpouring anyway

I am supposed to protect her not burden her

I have to say it

I am no oracle

But our civilisation might not outlast my daughter

And this spells untold trouble, great loss and pain.

Still we subside the fossil fuel industry

Look after powerful companies like they are babies

Whilst in the first month of her life an actual baby cries

And I pace the night-time corridor, patting her back

And crying too.

 

So I look again for fissures

For the shapes that tessellate

I am going to insist

That we already have the solutions

You will find them as you look

And shout for the chance to try them out

We don’t have the silent billionaires on side

Nor the political will to tame them

So let us spread the word

You know, take on the press and cause good trouble

The work of reimagining has been happening for decades

The work is to bring more into the fold

Out of the nourishing wombs of darkness

Let us birth more creativity, togetherness and resolve

Out of nonsense and obscurity may we get to what really matters