Monday, 13 April 2026

12 - Prickling Tributes

#NaPoWriMo Day 12 and tonight I’ve been writing a piece of free verse inspired by Prickly Pears – a tribute poem to all the performers tonight.

Normally, I’d tell you to remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the eleven preceding it) there. HOWEVER, I promised a recording to the performers, so you get it here too (and I’ll just have to come up with an extra gift for the Patreon subscribers to make up for this not being exclusive…).



We are safe, sound, and wonderfully
colourful, loving the brilliant wisdom
of glittering sensitivity, lifting each other,
comfortable challenges, deft and considerate.

Intro

Do or die is not today, burning down
expectations, searching out the dangers,
mistaking the ways of working,
turning lurking in perfection into freedom.

Kate

Sinners pay for the mistakes of
making noises, canonically confetti-strewn,
and construing duty as a
reconstruction of a stumble.

Gareth Barsby

Clap out the chaos, refusing to inflict
infantile isolation, reject rot, recognise the
wild sanctity of humanity, games
making fiction a breathlessly empty treachery.

Vayl

Let’s teach each other constructive alignment,
pedagogically, paradoxically dodging OFSTED,
bodging observations, repetitively dictating
today’s duration, even though it feels endless.

Pip

Open a correspondence into a lifetime of
idealism, downing a cocktail of
positive experiences, reeling and rocking,
mocking the inevitability with a grin.

Ash

Consumption of society’s norms can be filling,
drilling into the bedrock of toxic assumptions,
dumping constructions, rolling the stones
over and over to the conclusion of inevitability.

Sandra

Unprompted preparation paves the way for a final trip,
flipping memories over on the grill of reality,
the musicality of island tides gifting something
undefinable, measured in its loss, sweet as Paradise.

Phynne~Belle

Triple-time gifts us dancing experiments,
bending shackled minds to wander and wonder
under the bedrock echoes of the resounding repetition
of loneliness, serendipity abandoned, surviving unforgiven.

Joycey

Fresh words flourish in fertile space, stretching
restless frustration into a new cage, hemmed in,
digging into resentment, then switching optimistically,
gathering new meanings, leading to graceful patience.

Tamika

Paradoxically, we walk in contradiction, begging for
attention, twitching in syncope, drifting in focus,
opening minds to the ‘craziness’, not lazy, but blunted,
shunted into a category that clatters at the periphery.

Ashley

Cued up, we examine bigotry under a magnification
of narrative that serves only the kyriarchy,
wicked and wilful monochrome, honing the agenda
of apathy, the gift of those who spike the path mendaciously.

Phoenix

We’re a patchwork of fingerprints, beauty painting a
palimpsest of history, gifting us a view that inevitability
depends on compliance and forgetfulness, the weft of
deft love and clear eyes against the warp of greed.

Suzy

We carpet bare memories with prettiness,
mess swept under the fashionable patterns that
distract from the demons inscribed into the grain,
blame bobbing down the rivers of sweat buoying complicity.

Bethany

Colour flourishes up walls, adorning imaginations with
grace and clipping, trimming situations with
disappointment, impressing lines into blank pages,
the ages connecting, washing up against our shored stories.

Lee

We have opened many windows into compassion
dashing, sweet, spendthrift and multiplying,
kindness a warm gift that benefits every
member of our shared continuity.

Gareth Bartlett

Automated text tells a layered set of mixed messages
getting tangled in parallel meanings,
gleaning more than nonsense, the strangest
guest of humanity, sentience being a lucky dip.

Clive

And finally, functions summoned by departed friends
send us into a litter of plastic bagged eternity, wildness
lined with polymer, bone-deep, changing our definitions,
prinked colours murmurating across the canvas of the mind.

Beth

Thanks for the inspiration


Against a sky-blue background, a bearded, white, slender person with a helmet of dark, curling, shoulder-length hair, points upwards from behind a microphone with a yellow cover on it. They are wearing a black waistcoat over a red, short-sleeved top, and are clearly in the middle of saying something. Beside and behind them is a brightly sunlit, pale green cactus with bulbous, red protuberances, a little like prickly strawberries, sprouting off the top. All-caps, black words in an uneven font read PRICKLY PEAR OPEN MIC FEATURING FAY ROBERTS where the date, SUN 12TH APRIL 7PM BST, is written in red.
Poster of the event because why not?

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