If You Want My Opinion

“Mouthing Off” is a collection of performance poetry conceived and developed during the ultimate and primary decades of the 20th and 21st Centuries. It is a celebration, a call to arms, a diatribe and a lament from a black, working-class bohemian, mother living in Inner City London. You might want to consider that what I have to say may be of consequence... “Over”, the first section, is a joyous howl of hedonism and a hymn to the transformative potential of dancing, sex, self-empowerment and life force. Section two, MY, takes us into the problem territories. the soul-deadening apathy of commerce and the drip-feed addictive dry tit of hypnotic capitalism. Which, it would seem, we are thoroughly engaged, pushing the doom as far as it can go. “Dead”, section three continues into a more visionary and nuanced detailing of quite how fucked the world and its people are, a questioning of how we got here and what is needed to get out of it and undo the mess. In ourselves and with our tribes and on our planet. The fourth and final section, “Body” brings us to solutions, the ragged heroines and heroes who can make this change possible-the outskirt visionaries, the disenfranchised, the broken, the bereft. It is a clarion call revisiting the hedonistic liberation of the opening section, ending in a spirit of possibility, energy and hope that just might see us through.

BANGING ON is a collection of poetry written largely on the hoof during the first two decades of the 21st Century. It is a battle cry, a lament, a kick up the arse, a ritual and smirk with more than a hint of hysteria, in the original sense of the word... WITH, section one is somewhat wry commentary on the state of affairs we find ourselves confronted with as we encounter a seeming unceasing flow of interstate infamy and internet driven idiocy MY, the second section looks to the personal and community experience of inner-city life in a late-stage capitalist context and the high emotional costs of negotiating ones survival in between the headlines DYING The penultimate section examines more closely the physical, literal and conceptual assaults upon both one's person and one's spirit and speaks a yearning, a longing for a wholesome integration with the universe BREATH the fourth and final section concludes the journey with a promise of an ever more desperate insistence, a refusal to accept the paltry reward of capital, a determination to strive to live free, all under pinned by a comfortable acceptance that it isn't going to happen