Connections (Luton Fun Palace 1)

As part of the Luton Fun Palace, 2014, Fay Roberts and Sophia Walker took part in a found-poetry/ collaborative poetry/ beat poetry experiment to encapsulate the day in word form, accompanied by the band that had inspired the art that had inspired the graffiti that had inspired the poetry, and accompanied by dancers inspired by the music. With us so far?! :)

All the poems combine work by both poets. The first one is below:

Connections

I reach to my older self,

Awash in lights;

History is eyes of honeycomb,

Streets billow into monochrome.

Though the factory’s long passed

Fun Palace brings its history back

Like fresh plucked new feathers

Thrust in old caps

We are mining for craft,

And art, and cards,

Finding thirteen new ways to play,

Manufacturing new friends,

Blissed in music

[Musical break]

And news.

Accruing facts,

And hats.

So many hats!

Making loom bands while in back

The band jams. Funny, families

Gathered round the loom meant

Something different years back.

No bridge to gap, we’re a long time

From past, we’re past that, past

Hats, they passed the hat, turned

Factory into gallery, I passed back.

To hats, stacked on a table - Bare,

Awaiting decoration

I always thought the only bareness

In hats was on the heads they protected.

Never before thought of objects as naked,

But then no one ever thinks of naked,

Til you’re told you are.

We are a train of doors,

A lively bridging of

Test tubes and crayons.

The calligraphy of chromosomes

Dances in many-legged splendour.

We leave our fingerprints

In snow and ink and diamonds.

A casual corpse lingers, incidental.

Remember me?

On the wall there is a chalked outline of a body

Opposite, an empty page says “fill me”, says

“Found a corpse in the river. So yeah”

The page involves no river, that wall never

Asked to be drawn on. The link exists

In similarity over distance.

We link fingers in parallel;

Strands of rubber,

Of metal,

Of smiles,

Of history,

Of viruses,

Of the life in every thread.

And we beckon melodies

Across looms of friendship;

The present warps across

Past weft and we are

Woven together.