Bring Your Tiny Pony Warlord to the Dance Floor - a poem about trauma, being a bit crazy, and liberation

Yeah, there’s the occasional urge to bash a face in,
maybe don a big furry hat, ride a tiny screaming pony
through McDonald’s, slaughtering and pillaging,
kicking up whirlwinds of French fries and packaging,
and all because someone laughed at the wrong place
during our power point presentation, or took an extra
seven seconds at the checkout in Tesco’s.


So what? Our ancestors had to battle just to get to fuck
in order to make the ancestors that fucked to make us.
Warfare is scribbled in the sleeve notes of our blood.
Thousands upon thousands of years fighting
to live creates echoes that won’t die overnight.


Maybe meditate, get therapy, bake intense cakes;
let loose your war cries safely.


As a kid I loved to blow stuff up.
I still do if I’m honest,
though I often abstain these days.
I still have specks of rubber embedded
in my torso from leaping bonfires.
A gleeful monster seared into me
would love to see the world go up in flames.   


But not really. And so what?
I had relatives in the Holocaust.
Family alive by a single unstruck match.
Of course I want play with fire, make it mine.


We’ve all lurked behind sofas gobbling
entire chocolate cakes to ourselves,
fisting chips into our maws as our guts protest.
Guzzled, snorted, puffed and clicked into oblivion.


So what? Our ancestors had to chase horizons
just to eat. Some folks still do.
Of course we’re all wackos now
our shelves are so packed.
We suffer from having too much, too soon.


We’ve all risked the foundations of our lives
in rampant spurts of sex-bingo sometimes.


We’re all part of the mindwarp parade
feeding off of, feeding into, suffering from,
racism, sexism, global inequity,
the enslavement of our home planet’s
seemingly infinite species and beauty.


Humanity is waking from a nightmare
millennia long, from a psychosis;
believing we were separate, better, alone.


This stuff is scribbled all over us;
our epigenetic scripts are palimpsests,
our schools, streets and offices force us
to walk and talk weird;
we’re so programmed
for psycho-hopscotch
we don’t even notice
as we jump the steps.


The thing is, we each get to heal our share.
The very privilege of safety and abundance
creates space for the ghosts to speak.


If you have a full cupboard you’re kinda wealthy.
If you have time to watch TV you have time to heal.
If you have internet you have a world of free teachers.


Our inherited trauma and cultural conditioning
is not our fault. But healing it is our responsibility.


Bring your tiny pony warlord
to the dance floor or page.
Bring your ghosts into the conversation.
Guzzle courage, truth and love
as much as all the other stuff.
Let’s stop pretending we’re better than the world,
or separate from it or each other, or alone in any of this.