Author: othervoices40

Ex-Pats Don’t Cry – Gaby Sambuccetti

I was a teen

under the Malvinas post-war propaganda,

but my guilty pleasure was to listen to you.

 

By listening to your songs,

I accepted the otherness.

 

I was fourteen, and I read about the bad experience

that the band had,

when you went to Argentina for the first time.

 

Even though, you promised you will never come back there,

I didn’t mind

because I had the ability to see through your dark make-up.

 

And I’ve learnt to embrace singularity.

And I’ve learnt to use your songs while writing my poems,

to make catharsis… and survive.

 

I thought I was never going to see you playing,

But then, fifteen years later, I’ve come to live to the UK.

 

And I saw the band surrounded by long red curtains,

with an ancient Roman style: a circle with an elevated ceiling

at the Royal Albert Hall.

 

Just for an instant I forgot about nations,

oppression and war.

 

I was cured of the marked borders among our cultures,

The line in the ocean was getting undone.

 

I looked how grown you were,

How grown I was myself,

because we grew up together,

 

And we were finally at the same place.


So I misjudged your limit,

and I tried ‘to hide the tears in my eyes’

because expats don’t cry.

 

Gaby Sambuccetti – is a writer and teacher from Argentina. She is the author of   five books including the widely reviewed ‘Al Nudo Lo Que Nos Quito’. She has been the host and founder of different poetry events in Buenos Aires, like the events called ‘Palabras en el sótano’ (Words at the Cellar) and ‘Nos vemos!’ (See You Later!). After publishing her second book, in 2012, she moved to the UK. She is studying a creative writing BA at Brunel University while working as a teacher and as a writer. She is also events co-director at the Oxford Writers’ House.  

(Untitled) Lucinda Button

Into the forest

you and me,

the darkness is suffocating inside.

Here we go again,

I want to get off this ride.

 

I’m sick to my stomach,

your fingers in my brain.

Heart wide open,

yet darkness come down like rain

 

The monster is here.

Growing between us,

so much to fear.

I’m searching for the light, searching for the light,

when will this end

when will we give up the fight.

 

So many times,

So many places.

Too much pain

too many faces.

I’m broken, I’m spent,

Fucking done with the craziness.

Lucinda Button – Lucinda Button has been a Robert Smith and The Cure fangirl since her cliched teen angst years, they touched her as a deeply feeling and deeply thinking girl, and their music felt like a safe place in a world that felt often overwhelming. Their music has travelled with her for the last 25 years, as a (mostly) comfortable companion.

Into The Trees – Simon Paul Wilson

I have walked streets of fascination.

Pushed and fought, dreamt of heads on doors And of spider-people who exist only to devour.

I’ve covered my face in hanging gardens.

I’ve kissed and been tortured by girls who were so far away,

Never knowing how much they were adored.

And when worlds ended, when all had disintergrated, I would always return to that forest.

To hear her voice, to run towards nothing.

For when I was lost in the deep darkness, I would find the cure.

 

Simon Paul Wilson is an English man who travelled to Asia and found a second home. He is also a writer of what he likes to call quirky fiction and wasabi punk, Two totally up genres that he hopes will make him famous one day.

On ‘Disintergation’ – E.T Cresswell

I remember as though I were there,

Lounging afternoons in an Aston car park,

You, half-awake in the passenger seat,

Lost in the songs you would one day play for me.

 

Emerging, new and dark and beautiful,

In the year I was born,

A sweet melancholy on summer days

For a dark-eyed winterborn child;

They were always, somehow, mine.

 

They stayed, reaching deep into the wells of my mind,

Infused forever in the thoughts, conversations,

The stories, loves, poems, loves, fears and fantasies

Of a green-eyed father looking forwards;

They were always, somehow, yours.

 

I don’t think of you often,

Musing late nights in an empty bar

Until longed-for auras cloud my eyes and my mind calls to yours,

Lost in the songs you used to play for me.

 

E-T Cresswell – I was introduced to The Cure at a young age, by a father with very good taste in music. Ey has enjoyed writing since primary school, though ey did not experiment with poetry until ey was a teenager. The Cure became a big influence on their earliest poems, though these did not do justice to their inspirations as well as the young E-T believed they did. E-T likes to think that ey has improved greatly since then. Ey currently lives in Oxford, where ey works in a vegetarian pub, and often performs at the Catweazle Club open mic night.