While writing the story of how I got into acting, I mentioned that I began 2018 with a seven-day fast. This spoken word performance took place at the end of that fast, which was in protest against the two years of abuse I’d been subject to by that point.
The poem must have written in 2016 or 2017.
I’m getting annoyed with all this trite ‘love yourself’ stuff in the air these days. One hears it all the time, like propaganda in a one party state of mind. Who doesn’t act in their own self-interest? so, I’ve written this:
Your self feeds on love will eat up all your love, insatiable. Don't love yourself. It's a trap! Love will die forever, entombed, self-consumed. Your hungry-for-self-love self desiring nothing else , growing bloated until, until... it releases emanations of death in an urban graveyard. Of the self that loves There will be nothing left. STOP LOVING YOURSELF! It's not the only way to be. Look up. Look out. Love me.
In outer space, they say, no one can hear me scream Because of the not-quite vacuum Sound cannot travel there Despite the plasma, the hydrogen, the dark energy. Mal-adapted to outer space, we creatures of air And carbon. Yet made since the first fire Spurred on by cold war To venture out there. To outer space. The non-terrestrial Contains us, and rocks condensed from gas With molten cores. So standing on the surface of Mars, for example, look out and see Horizon. That line between the ground and the pink sky, another sky. Beneath it lie valleys, mountains and caves. In another landscape We see a topography both known and unknown. And so having come so far, we find ourselves some way home.