I’ve done the heart

I’ve done the fist

What will I speak through next,

this poet-cum-ventriloquist?

It just sort of crept up on me

My bus ride to the station

Me buying of a flat white

Me fancying a man on the platform

All the people going about their business

It all seemed very normal

I had no reason to fight it

because I didn’t know that it was ther...

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Centipede

Have you ever engaged in radical deep listening?

Do you listen to what’s crawling around your feet

but is making the loudest sound?

There is no sound as loud as silence

But the centipede is not silent

Listen carefully and he will deafen your drums

Why do we only hear

the loudest speaker with his mic?

The centipede is the one creating

the loudest sonic ...

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Image: Mum’s, Anne Campbell’s (nee Styles)  sewing kit circa 1959

The heart is a muscle

Caller:  Hello, is that Lee?

Me: Yes, speaking

Caller: Hello, I’m Paul calling from The Missing Bodies List

I am pleased to say that we think we may have found your heart

It was found outside shivering in the cold on the side of the road

by a late-night drinker. Broken ...

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POW! WOW! WHAT’S THIS?!

Susan Broadhurst, author of Liminal Acts

writes that my work challenges what performance is

and at the same time interrogating liminality

meaning the ‘in-between’

For me, the window is a liminal threshold

that is neither private nor entirely public

When I was around 15 or 16,

I slept with a glass jar on a table by my bedside

Inside...

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See, I thought I’d found my Tiana

A nice little smoochy snog,

behind that rock shaped like a toad

your kiss turned me into a frog

Not way it’s meant to be I thought,

was like that fable in reverse

Your kiss made this already prince

into a toad, your kiss was curse

And though your kiss was rather nice

and pleased as hell we did it did it

Opened my mouth to my...

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Surprised you’re not a footballer

You played a blinder tonight

Surprised you’re not a tailor

You stitched me up good and proper

Surprised you’re not a barber

You had me by the short and curlies

Surprise, surprise, mate,

you ain’t worth the agg.

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Collaboration is about being in the world

unless you want to be alone in the woods somewhere

And it is not about perfect unity,

collaboration is, as Tim Etchells suggests

about differences, collisions, incompatibilities

Are you ready to feel the embodiment of these terms?

Or are you feeling them already?

Friendly, convivial and equal collaboration,

is that possible...

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CREEPER

It just sort of crept up on me

The bus ride to the station

the buying of a flat white

the fancying of a man on the platform

the people going about their business

It all seemed very normal

I had no reason to fight it

because I didn’t know that it was there

Until I started having this feeling

and so, I butchered its body

Into pieces but as a whole...

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Thought is made manifest in the mark as a trace

but let me tell you about the trouble with traces

I rummage through life’s leftover marks

Traces from a previous exhibition

Text left on a wall,

plinths not yet been removed,

drawings now dumped in a corner as rubbish

I am for a poetry of embodied debris,

left in the aftermath

Speaking bodies caught

between memo...

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