Joelle Taylor is a poet, spoken word artist, playwright andnovelist. She has performed both nationally and internationally atvenues as diverse as the 100 Club, the Royal Festival Hall,Parliament, Zimbabwe, Buckingham Palace, Glastonbury Festival,Botswana, the Royal Court, Ronnie Scot’s, school assemblies,classrooms, prisons and strange ships. She is a former UK slamchampion and founder and artistic director of the Poetry Society’snational solo youth slam SLAMbassadors UK. She has producedfour plays for theatre as well as several texts on performancepractice. This is her second poetry collection.

htp://joelletaylordotorg.wordpress.com

The Woman Who Was Not There

Joelle Taylor

Burning Eye

Copyright © 2014 Joelle Taylor

The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author ofthis work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmited, in

any form or by any means without the prior writen consent ofBurning Eye Books, nor be otherwise circulated in any form ofbinding or cover other than that in which it is published andwithout a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent

purchaser.

This edition published by Burning Eye Books 2014

www.burningeye.co.uk

@burningeye

Burning Eye Books

15 West Hill, Portishead, BS20 6LG

ISBN 978 1 90913 639 7

The Last Poet Standing

(I)

I am the last poet standingon this blank stageof bruised pavements,broken with missed opportunitiesand well-aimed misunderstandings. They say our children are too demanding. The scent of sweat at the base of the spinecarried on wolves of windlures the gangs in.

Even the air we breathe has chalk lines around it;police barrier tape surrounds itwhile the skin of our streetsis tatooed with grin and gut graffiti,the city’s obituarycut by street artists, cultural terrorists and infant infantry,sprayed in blood and ink

Our young are force-fed on vulnerability and violence.Their lullabies are the cries of police sirensand the echo of doors slamming late under midnight moons as

wide as children’s eyes.She didn’t come home again tonight.She never will.But that childwill wait for her for the rest of his life.

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(II)

These canals, these tracks, these umbilical streets,these arteries of our citiesare clogged with discarded dreams and shopping trolleys.

Our kids die in school corridors,not just in intangible, illegal, immoral warsbut the simpler war betweenself-respect and self-esteem.

Children,

on these roads it is expected that you will stumble fumble HUMBLE your grip on your dream –

but they are the only things we have,these delusions of equality.So stand up, speak free, exercise linguistic liberty,shut up and speakbecause disappointment is viralto the point where low expectation equals survivaland when there is litle sense of truth, honour and justice it is tempting to become tribal.

(III)

Our thin children have dug themselves in to their own fragile skinand hide behind sandbags, strips of colour, postcodes and liesand a cheap pound shop prideand a knife.Always a knife –that reflects the hand that holds it;the blade reflects the hand that holds it.

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When you see your face can you remember your name?

Our fathers are pugilist or foetal, boxers or babies,missing in action,a paste link in the cheap chain reactionthat leaves us lost in our own living roomsand he,he is just an empty chair, an empty promiseor the hierarchy of the fist above the kiss,a shadow receding in the mist,retreating in the mist.

Fear is your father forgeting your name.

It’s geting dark.We are a long way from homeand from a distancethat drained and greying tower blockis a gravestoneand every window lit is a word upon it.But who will write our epitaphs when all the poets have gone?Who will write our epitaphs when all the poets have gone?Who is going to write our epitaphs when all the young poets have

gone?

We will never rest in peace –not while police stand guard outside school gatesand children have Kentucky fried complexionsand education is dependent upon government inspectionand knowledge is privilegeand the libraries of our lives are pillaged.

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We will never rest in peace –not while children cannot spell their own names and they are the monsters beneath their own bedsand they’re afraid of themselves and everything they wish they’d

saidand the colour of ink is redand this whole town is proof-marked in blood.

Not while there is one poet left standing.

(IV)

We have been worshipping false prophets for false profits:the cult of celebrity,the cynical, cyclical celebration of hypocrisythat allows us to watch the outside world as though it is reality TVwhile our children are outsidebent-kneedpicking broken glass from their eyes,broken class.You see,there was never an end to slavery.We just don’t define it anymore simply by ethnicitybut by economy.Can you hear the gangs howlingfrom the plains of Peckham to the hard lands of Hackney?

They have your scent.

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(VI)

You will see me.You will see poetrywriten among the broken glass and the graffiti,starring in the shatered lenses of CCTV.

You will see poetry.

You will see poetryin the Braille of night skies,in the length of time a parent takes to say goodbye,son, see you soon,in the harvest moon of children’s eyesor that girl perched on the lip of the tower block preparing to flyas wild birds escape the gilded bars of her ornamental rib cage,even in the ganglands’ wasteland warrior cries.

Every one of these tower blocks is a book.Open it.There is hope in it.

There is poetry.

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No Man’s Land

His face was a foreign countryand his tongue was a concealed gun.His laugh was an air raid sirenand his mouth a deep cave dug in Iraqi earth,a shallow grave on the edge of town.His beard was the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the campand his skin was a hand-writen map sewn into his shirt,a deserted field at midnight.His eyes were abandoned soft buried landminesand his voice was radio static caught between stations.His ribs were the gripped bars of a Guantanamo Bay cageand his lips the careful line at Customs,the border between territories.

And he walked like a school child lost in the rubble of her homeand he spoke like a low-flying plane looking to land.Welcome to England.Asalaam alaikum.

But Immigration Central was a love leter writen in another language

and when he smiledhis teethwere the New Yorkskyline.

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International Pen PalIt is strange to think that everything I write or perform and everypositive workshop I lead will be taxed and that money transformed intoweapons of war. An estimated 17,400 civilians have been killed since thewar in Afghanistan began. I will work with the refugees of that war, andwill be taxed per poem I help create and write myself. That tax will beused to create more refugees of war who I will then go and work with.

This poem is a bullet.

Each hammered wordthe march of boots.Each strike of typea semi-automatic ratle.I have writen armies;do not listen to me.

This poem is friendly fire.

This poem isthe shifting of the earth, the assassin that sleeps beneath her feetas she leaves early that day to collect thin firewoodthat when lit will keep her family cold for centuries.This poem has waited yearsand when it speaks,opens its red mouth,the whole world falls to its knees and weeps.

She is an explosion wrapped in ribbon.May I be forgiven.

This poem is a young manuprooted from Customs

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and poted in a tight airless roombefore menwith tight airless smilesand asked to spell his nameagain,spell it again.This poem is a passporttorn in two,stampedwith boot marks.

This poem is a young girlin burkha and Nikehiding beneath a bus seatas strange-dressed men comeand pick off the women one by one,sniper smiles held to their headsas soldiers look to the whispering men to speak;this poem is the last thing she reads.

This poem has taken language;each word writen here has scrubbed out a mother tongue.This poem has eaten history.This poem is history.This poem lies silent beneath dusty roadsor waits at the outskirts of woodsor bursts into a house at 3amsobbing through oiled shotgun-barrel eyeswith mouths of mass graves.This poem has lined relatives up against wallsand told them to dance.

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Dance.

This poem wants to be a roof,it wants to be wood,a school desk,a bus seat.It wants to be the correct spelling of a name,a sleeping relative,silence.

This poem wants to be a poem

but

this poem is a bullet.A real poet would not write it.

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