Ask me face to face what’s going on,
I’ll say, “I’m sound” then waffle on.
Make some joke, scratch my beard,
change the subject, disappear.
It’s not that I’ve got nowt to say,
my brain’s got twelve debates a day.
Autism’s filing facts in rows,
while ADHD’s nicked the notes and goes.
There’s grief sat drinking builder’s tea,
trauma doing squats behind me.
One thought’s deep, one’s talking shite,
all of them turn up at night.
But try and say it out aloud,
my words get lost inside the crowd.
My mouth says something dull and small,
while my head’s written fuck knows all.
Then I’m alone, the house goes still,
Diesel’s snoring, Eddie won’t chill.
It’s stupid o’clock, my thumb hits screen,
and suddenly I say what I actually mean.
No awkward pause, no watching eyes,
no nervous laugh or quick disguise.
Just messy truth in little lines,
the stuff I hide comes out in rhymes.
Most poems never saw a face,
they lived inside a private place.
Notes on phones and scraps in drawers,
little bits of me behind locked doors.
Then I put a few on Facebook,
thinking maybe ten might look.
Someone saw the words I’d thrown,
and somehow turned one into song.
That opened something I’d kept shut,
which was brilliant, weird and scary as fuck.
Because now the things I wrote alone,
were playing back through someone’s phone.
So I thought, sod it, I’ll have a go,
turn a few more into tracks of my own.
I found my sound, gave words a beat,
then nervously lobbed them on TikTok’s street.
I thought a few might stop and stare,
maybe scroll past, maybe not care.
Then strangers listened, shared and said,
“You’ve written what lives inside my head”
Which sounds lovely, and it truly is,
but fuck me, this exposure business.
Because stuff I wrote at stupid times,
is now being sung by people online.
It’s brilliant, terrifying, weird as hell,
because poetry knows me far too well.
It says the things my mouth can’t do,
then hands the private bits to you.
I never planned to be exposed,
I just cracked a window, not the doors.
But people listened and said, “That’s me”
which scared the absolute shit out of me.
So that’s why poems get the truth,
the old bloke now, the angry youth.
The dad, the joker, the stubborn git,
the man who’s fine, except for all of it.
Face to face, I’ll lose my thread,
make a joke and nod instead.
But give me silence, dogs and time,
and my whole mad brain starts making rhyme.
I don’t write poems to sound profound,
I write because they kinda calm things down.
My mouth never gets it fucking right,
but my thumbs don’t seem to have stage fright.