Have You Heard? Poem By Raymond Antrobus. Video By Adam Docker.

Have You Heard? from Adam Docker on Vimeo.

Me

I am a museum
and everything is in the dark.
I feel for the walls,
still ignoring the grainy voice of
nowhere. I hold out a black map and look in a place I’ve never been
for the colour of lightning. My chances are losing
weight.

The museum is exhibiting the way I breathe.
The warm air is soft
and bleeds easily. Black is the burnt smell of all questions that got
answers by falling onto the slow barbeque of time.

‘Nowhere’ is still a voice
somewhere in my head, where I open walls
with fists and call it the art of hidden anger -
this has me biting into my breath, for the taste of youth
in my breaking voice.

Funeral For A Party

Your red shirt with the black tie
and your little pink cowboy party hat
smell like the hospital.

You tell the guests in the garden
your Dad has lung cancer,
you are watching him die slowly.

The music turns off -
The kids who were dancing in the street
walk home under rain.
The couple kissing under the bus shelter
don’t feel right without the music.
Every head is down, their hands
in raincoats –

The weatherman promised a pink sky
why is it black?

Death is standing in the flowerbed
wearing a black smoking jacket
trying to light the barbecue.