Hold Your Own (8 page)

Buzzwords everywhere. Progress. Freedom.

He picks his teeth with a dirty needle

And kicks his feet to the latest jingles.

Ain’t got no time to be dating singles.

Far too busy trying to make things simple.

This old tribe ain’t nothing special.

All my life I’ve watched men wrestle,

Stealing land to fly their flags.

He keeps his eyes in a plastic bag.

He keeps his eyes in a plastic bag.

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks to Becky Thomas, Don Paterson and all at Picador.

‘Ballad of a hero’ was originally commissioned by Tongue Fu for The Space and appeared on
thespace.org
under the name
War Music
(after Logue).

‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’ is a line from Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’.

Extract from ‘How To Be A Great Writer’ from
Love is a Dog From Hell
by Charles Bukowski (Ecco Books) © The Charles Bukowski Estate.

K
ATE
T
EMPEST
was born in 1985 and grew up in South-East London, where she still lives. She started out as a rapper, toured the spoken word circuit for a number of years and began writing for theatre in 2012. Her work includes the album
Balance
, recorded with Sound of Rum;
Everything Speaks in its Own Way
, a collection of poems published on her own imprint Zingaro;
GlassHouse
, a forum theatre play for Cardboard Citizens; and the plays
Wasted
and
Hopelessly Devoted
for Paines Plough, both published by Methuen. Her epic narrative poem
Brand New Ancients
won the Ted Hughes Prize in 2013; it completed a sell-out run in the UK and New York and won a Herald Angel at Edinburgh Fringe.
Everybody Down
, her debut solo album, was released on Big Dada Records in 2014.

Also by Kate Tempest

Brand New Ancients

Copyright © 2014 by Kate Tempest

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR

eISBN: 978-1-63286-206-8

First published by Picador in 2014

This electronic edition published in March 2015

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