Road Map by Sky Hawkins
She asked me to write a road map.
A road map of the feelings, and thoughts
that spill into the cracked paths.
She asked me to pick each word out
among the grazed leaves.
So i arrived with no paper and pen
forgetting that’s what’s needed to write a road map.
Maybe a consequence of the crippling crisis of greed arrived
at the Westend of all our lives.
They shout ‘ No to money-saving tips. It’s fucking patronizing ‘
And won’t help the black and brown women
who are always paid less?
They say small things trigger bad things
And ‘We don’t want the cheapest options that are not restocked on the shelves anyway.
We want our kids to have the 7-day fruit and veg, that the government
recommended to live a long and healthy life’
She asked me to write a road map.
So i came back to hear another poet’s voice
who emptied her bag of gathered voices. A box of the voiceless.
She poured out the process in drips and drabs
whilst the sunlight lit up time-restrained defiance chiseled back to
boots tired and tattered from walking these road maps.
Hope tiptoes across the cracks where their lost letters slipped through.
They always rise though with warm pits, hands.
Always search back home with kindness prevailed in their hats.
She asked me to write a road map.
So i arrive at the System, the broken, the sign stop.
And it ain’t pretty.
Its empty milk bottles delivered to doorsteps
full of media trash, shame, blame, choice, and lack.
Our kids are drinking this shit daily
The more privileged will eat it with breakfast.
She asked me to write a road map.
So i stop with eyes full.
Spillover my own struggles with mental health
and the magnifying glass which enables the sunlight to burn the pages.
How it’s harder now.
How pulling down a footbridge drowns us all.
How the steep river banks provide a view
no one bothers to ask if it brings the people
whose eyes absorb the green. Help?
And let’s face it they are not going to ask us to drown, sorry,
swim in our own pools, caz they’re even taking these away from us now.
She asked me to write a road map.
They ask us not to parachute into the working-class boys on bikes
making their own videos of Grime.
They ask us to listen, hear their culture, their history,
their own myths and laws.
Their ways of being in this world.
They tell us.
We will build our own road maps.
