Gareth Durasow

Biography

Gareth is a prize-winning poet, performer, playwright and workshop leader based in West Yorkshire. His performances contain a liberal dose of humour and are served via a theatrical style which alternates between the disarmingly endearing, the riotously funny and the blisteringly intense. He performs regularly at events ranging from intimate readings at cafes and bars to renowned literature festivals, performing amongst the audience with whom he loves to collaborate – creating a truly unique spoken word experience. Gareth is one of the most engaging performance poets I have seen… he reminded me of Gethin Price, the anti-hero of Trevor Griffith’s 'Comedians'. James Walker, LeftLion magazine There is a West Yorkshire sensibility that stretches out to something universal. Ian McMillan, on Gareth's poetry

Samples

Romance Versus You can export the kids to Sega’s game testing farm but it’s the little things you find later that do the worst. Hairpins, backs of earrings: the pillow’s rife with them, the magpie drops his euro, swivels his scouser’s eye on the refuse of love, like dud cluster bombs inclined to detonate some tears and obligating a cover-up: but where to find the grit to blame at such short notice is all that stops you from seizing the mediocre totem and pulling its clean head off at the stroke of the animal hour. Dream you is cutting cigars whilst I roll ripostes, having won an Oscar for the scene where she strips and I blush. To look at us now who would suspect that my childhood ended in a Hadouken fireball, yours with the failure of an otherwise perfect cobweb wife to stop or to quicken their husband’s metronome pencil pulse, discovering it takes a city girl to make such Arcadian poets turn away from personal letters to the months September, April and June, to compel the heart to reach up to the throat for a kiss. The word on the street is there’s talk round these parts that your first one’s for free and if your name’s not down then I don’t know what is. So, did you find her like this? You tell me. I’m only the man about the house, knitting jumpers from steel wool, downing Ocean Spray in one. Fancy a cuppa? Mind the breasts, they’re only latex guv. Am I off in the back? Would you prefer me in the front? Depends on whether I’ll incur a penalty for using non- regulation handcuffs. That sounded sexier in my head. Valentine’s Day, though you’d think it the feast of fools, negotiating routes round readers on the bookshop stairs, minding lampshades hung from boutique candelabra, birdcages loaded with genuine lilies, your motherly fuss lest the glove-puppet’s moulting messed up my sleeve despite the threat of your face being pecked to bits. Yes, the lights were dead in every carriage home. Yes, incontinent ghosts queued to use the toilet across. But since when were these enough to terminate a kiss? I anticipate spending the whole recession knocking about with callow poets, striding atop the shoulders of hobbled superpowers stooped in prayer and bellowing ‘Bring it on!’ as the better ones rub their fingerless gloves together behind a disco veil of dustbin flames, wondering whether their eyes deceive them or is that the royal conscriptioner on approach, fed bull on how great verse is cheap though the laureate’s lost her job and the lynch mob mistook her for a bureaucrat as she trudged out through the backdoor. Facing an emotional zugzwang I too have fallen back upon the bankrupt phrases ‘at the end of the day’ and ‘I’m not being funny, but’ in order to coerce remorse for her reasonable contribution towards this, the fatal spat of yet another romance-turned-travelling-sitcom that sees methylated elders confer curt greetings as I crumble at the border, a heap of flasks & pots & pans, having broken amateur fists on the told-you-so-signpost: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING [insert home town here].

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.