Gabriella

And even when she wasn’t there

as the life and soul who everyone loved,

She was, magpie-like

Always looking down on us

Gabriella, ‘strength’ in Hebrew

An Italian with broken English

And a broken sense of direction

She was, not pigeon-like, no formel

But she was as loyal as any she-wolf

Always looking out for us

I met her in Hackney, late Ni...

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Drawing is

I have always drawn for as long as I can remember

Drawing is my first artistic passion,

as it not just because I enjoy image making

but as a calming meditative process

Like Da Vinci who drew the body to help him understand,

I too learn using pencils in my hand

To slow reveal

Surface tension, fleshy, layers seep underneath

and reveal themse...

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One day, one day
We will sit on that bench 
under the lights 
Overlooking the river 
which you sweetly 
think is the sea

One day, one day
You will drown 
I will drown 
One day, one day 
I will drown you 
You will drown me
In happiness 
In smiling nuts
In pistachios 

That truck that’s travelled
all the way from Mexico 
on its way to the stores 
loaded with pistachios 
will cr...

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In Greek mythology, Leda and the Swan

is a story in which the god Zeus,

in the guise of a swan,

seduces Leda, a Spartan queen 

As a swan, Zeus falls into her arms

for protection from a pursuing eagle

Now, you may not believe me but,

taxidermy, dating and the art of seduction

go hand in hand with  the joy and torture of desire

I remember a first date, H...

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Out of frame

Outside the box

the feathers continue to 

fall

on cigarette ash

where the marks

Of love’s desire came and burnt

The softness and subtlety at which they

fall

silently are disturbed by the noise

Of the men simultaneously cumming

And they continue to

fall

onto the back

Of the male muscular torso frame

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We are caught,

caught in a stream of floating heads

Provocative faces preaching divisive politics

Spewing universalist values as well as those who meme these voices

Through a satiric vernacular

We live in a spectacularly tense age,

the complexities of speaking

bound up with far wider socio-cultural politics,

the question as to how to represent a voice,

to articulate a hu...

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All he wants to do is wrap his arms around him

But he must curtail the sanguine of his love 

There can be beauty

There can be sanguine

in enchevêtrement,

in complication and entanglement,

in mismatch and incongruity

Two opposing feelings

do not have to fit together,

It doesn't have to be a conflict

We created rupture

We prised open something

...

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Breaking from a

thirty-year habit

of only buying

medium thin green,

today, I bought

brown flavoured Rizla

Even though I

never use filters,

prefer it raw,

they don’t taste

quite as liquorice-y

on my own

than smoking liquorice

roll-ups with you

Neither that sweet

reverb after inhale

Nor comfort kiss

of eating liquorice

shoelac...

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I’ve done the heart

I’ve done the fist

What will I speak through next,

this poet-cum-ventriloquist?

It just sort of crept up on me

My bus ride to the station

Me buying of a flat white

Me fancying a man on the platform

All the people going about their business

It all seemed very normal

I had no reason to fight it

because I didn’t know that it was ther...

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My heart, she is a poetress
Goes back and forth and then some more
Thought she’d found beauty in his caress 
but beauty is far from what he saw 
 
Now let’s be frank here poetress
He’s blinded you, too blind to see 
He’s locked you in his mind fortress
That doesn’t sound like love to me 

But manipulation, more or less
By he you think can do no wrong 
He’s a slimy toad,a frog at best, 
...

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Centipede

Have you ever engaged in radical deep listening?

Do you listen to what’s crawling around your feet

but is making the loudest sound?

There is no sound as loud as silence

But the centipede is not silent

Listen carefully and he will deafen your drums

Why do we only hear

the loudest speaker with his mic?

The centipede is the one creating

the loudest sonic ...

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Tremors that he gives me confirm that 
the heart is a muscle
as mythical, as magical, as mysterious  
as a stitcher, tailor, clairvoyant, wordsmith
made manifest as a minotaur 
who cares for his brothers
A sage who is fuelled by compassion
Not seduced by illusions of fairweather friends

Even though we often 
stay up late swapping each others poems,
talking about a shared love of physic...

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Don’t lock yourself!

Unblock yourself!

Unlock yourself!

Shock yourself!

Speak, be outspoken!

A pint in my local, Christmas Day 1999

First time I looked over at Danny and thought ‘Damn, he is fine’

Playing pool with the lads, Danny-boy on my mind

Bent over the table, that peachy behind

His wife on the phone saying turkey is served

I quick brushed up against h...

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Even though we often stay up late swapping each others poems

and talking about a shared love of Geoffrey Chaucer,

 I’m still too embarrassed to ask him how to pronounce his name

Last night he gave me a lighter and told me I could keep it

Standard looking with no distinguishing features

unlike the way he carries himself in his lime green coat

which seems to consume his whole b...

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Image: Mum’s, Anne Campbell’s (nee Styles)  sewing kit circa 1959

The heart is a muscle

Caller:  Hello, is that Lee?

Me: Yes, speaking

Caller: Hello, I’m Paul calling from The Missing Bodies List

I am pleased to say that we think we may have found your heart

It was found outside shivering in the cold on the side of the road

by a late-night drinker. Broken ...

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Just going about your day 
Making a cup of tea 
You're at Tesco’s,
you're buying lettuce, 
‘Oh yeah’
A ball can drop very rapidly 

Certain times of the year
you feel more connected,
at the same time, 
sometimes,
just out of nowhere
 
The last couple of years  
he decided to go to work
Focus
To feel like his life 
hasn't been ripped apart
That memory of his life 
falling apart a...

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Just allowing it to be,

stop trying to intellectualise it

stop trying to find an answer, 

Or try to make rational sense of it

Futile.

It must make sense, 

everything and nothing makes sense

I hold myself to this standard

I regard myself a logical human being,

which I know is a contradiction

in and of itself

Humans are not logical

We are emotional

So why am I ...

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She just couldn't, 

She couldn't literally continue

Her whole life breaking down,

she’s had to build her whole life back up

And it's happened in such a painful,

but in such an incredible way 

that she could never have imagined, 

He has given her 

this incredible gift of her new life

But she wishes that he was with her 

He got the call, it happened

He was ...

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Humour is in my blood

Dr Campbell has a thesis,

a catalogue of comedic wordplay weapons to engage, disarm, highlight, defend, parry, attack and destroy

Heckler and poetress in camp and absurdity

Challenger, transgressor, subversive, rebel

Whether I’m Dr Campbell,

or Mademoiselle Camp-Belle,

humour is my disruptive and cathartic act

‘Even when you’re not using ...

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POW! WOW! WHAT’S THIS?!

Susan Broadhurst, author of Liminal Acts

writes that my work challenges what performance is

and at the same time interrogating liminality

meaning the ‘in-between’

For me, the window is a liminal threshold

that is neither private nor entirely public

When I was around 15 or 16,

I slept with a glass jar on a table by my bedside

Inside...

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She’s been getting away with it, repeatedly

She’s been walking in the rain just to get wet on purpose, repeatedly

She’s been forcing herself not to forget just to feel worse, repeatedly

She hates that mirror, it makes her feel so worthless, repeatedly

She’s an original sinner but when she’s with him, she couldn't care less, repeatedly

She thought she gave up falling in love a l...

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See, I thought I’d found my Tiana

A nice little smoochy snog,

behind that rock shaped like a toad

your kiss turned me into a frog

Not way it’s meant to be I thought,

was like that fable in reverse

Your kiss made this already prince

into a toad, your kiss was curse

And though your kiss was rather nice

and pleased as hell we did it did it

Opened my mouth to my...

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Surprised you’re not a footballer

You played a blinder tonight

Surprised you’re not a tailor

You stitched me up good and proper

Surprised you’re not a barber

You had me by the short and curlies

Surprise, surprise, mate,

you ain’t worth the agg.

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Collaboration is about being in the world

unless you want to be alone in the woods somewhere

And it is not about perfect unity,

collaboration is, as Tim Etchells suggests

about differences, collisions, incompatibilities

Are you ready to feel the embodiment of these terms?

Or are you feeling them already?

Friendly, convivial and equal collaboration,

is that possible...

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CREEPER

It just sort of crept up on me

The bus ride to the station

the buying of a flat white

the fancying of a man on the platform

the people going about their business

It all seemed very normal

I had no reason to fight it

because I didn’t know that it was there

Until I started having this feeling

and so, I butchered its body

Into pieces but as a whole...

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Thought is made manifest in the mark as a trace

but let me tell you about the trouble with traces

I rummage through life’s leftover marks

Traces from a previous exhibition

Text left on a wall,

plinths not yet been removed,

drawings now dumped in a corner as rubbish

I am for a poetry of embodied debris,

left in the aftermath

Speaking bodies caught

between memo...

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Image: Lee Campbell, ‘PITCH FACE’, pins and mixed media on canvas (2005) 

When I was young, JD and coke

Tried acting macho, what a joke

My friends knew that was mirrors smoke

‘Be yourself Lee, don’t cut him out!’

Whilst acting macho, breath it stink

Jack Daniels was my favourite drink

I gave right in to his wink wink

Lost all control, was on the brink

Control of...

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