This year's Glastonbury website poet in residence is Vanessa Kisuule, a writer and performer based in Bristol, UK. She has won more than ten slam titles and been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, and Radio 4's Woman's Hour, The Guardian, Blue Peter, Sky TV, Don't Flop and TEDx. Vanessa has performed internationally and has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books: Joyriding The Storm (2014) and A Recipe For Sorcery (2017). She is currently the Bristol City Poet for 2018 - 2020. For more info, head to her website. We will be posting Vanessa's work throughout this year's Festival, and she's kicked us off with the wonderful poem below. You can also see her perform in the Poetry&Words tent at 4.05pm on Sunday 30th June. Love Letter to Lizzo #23 The stage is a galaxy, shouts of joy orbiting around your heat and light. Big. Black. Blessing. You are all of these things. I look down at my thighs, sigh at the years wasted in the antithesis of worship. The ground is shaking. A ceaseless tide of jiggle, coming home to our own thrones stoned in onyx. Exorcised of liquid ghosts, We sweat and we wail, skin sacred as a Prince song. You reflect us reflecting you, a kaleidoscope of mirrors gifting us kind and undying joy. That voice bends and dips, spits game, soothes spirits. The moon is a pretty fuckboy but we eclipse him, regardless. Here. Now. Yes. You are all of those things. Your laugh a love letter addressed to all of us, envelope upended, all tits and ass and tears and faithful tremor. We're good as hell. Better, even. As close to heaven as us glorious heathens could hope for. The Portaloo Dance, 2.04am A little trickle, A tiny, little trickle, A microscopic, incidental, inconsequential trickle. That's all it is, really. A tiny, teeny, harmless, trickle Barely kissing the polyester terrace of my taut gusset Just an itsy, bitsy, subatomic trickle Hardly tickling the lettuce, if I'm honest. And this? This awkward shuffle, poor-mans-two-step-lock-kneed-Charleston, is a dance craze that I've just created to the syncopated rhythm of Portaloo doors sw-swinging open and sl-slamming shut And I can see it taking it off, really really taking off, Those three glittered girls are copying me as we speak And this tiny, little trickle is definitely not becoming a steady drip, not a shy but tenacious geyser seeping through my Marks and Sparks finest to the famed freedom of Inner Thigh Valley I'm just focused on the crash and shudder of those doors, gifting the queue with ripe wafts of what's inside each time. I'm not stressed, fussed or flustered by this smell, this queue, This treacherous trickle growing to a brazen drip, threatening to be a FURIOUS FLOOD OF IMPATIENT PISS, THE VERY LIQUID THAT FLOWS FROM SATAN'S EYES AND PORES, BRIGHT AS IRN BRU AND HOT AS MOLTEN FURY. Nope. Not me. I'm just stood here Having a little dance (that's properly catching on) That's all it is, really The Gospel According to Glastonbury In mapping the width, breadth and giddy sway, arrogant minds are lost in Sisyphean tumbles, fat tongues drown in tropes. Such a muchness and just Two soft eyes to drink it in. The unbuckled truth is this: it has never been about music, though the open jaw of sound sits wide as a whale's and the reverb swells like oceans and we sing ourselves throatless it is more: gospel guts untangled, a pile of clock-hand kindling for the ritual bonfire of time. All of us a thick straggle of trapped noise turned luminous. We ooze out like the spilt milk of a sunrise, stretched like yawning dough drunk on Lazarus laughter. In the gap between joy and benevolent blades of grass, there is a girl dressed as a naked lightning strike, telling an old tale of the future. But never mind all that.The present is piping hot and pulsing beneath this diligent, softened soil. Every anorak-ed disciple wears a smile here - pan for them like gold in a silty river. Now: weep wordlessly at a song you've never heard before, bleeding from a half empty tent on Sunday afternoon. Hold the intimate anecdotes of shiny strangers like lucky pennies. Tell yourself to yourself. Stroke the knee of immortality. Fill your wellies with this feeling. Feel it and feel it and feel it and Focus on one, pebble sized thing. Christen it the god of all good things on this fickle field of chance. Then get on those tired knees (mud and germs be damned). Let that filthy awe make a feral convert out of you. Revenge of the Abandoned Tents The khaki carcass of an Argos tent belches. A beer can sails from his mouth, a mangled femur bone follows. His slick, blue skinned friend is still famished, surveying the field for sun slack flesh. She spots her next meal: lain on a crumpled halo of wet wipes and woe, Complete with come-down curved shoulders, and a falafel-crumb-studded beard stiff with five day sweat and garnished with glitter. Delicious. Delirious. Doomed. She reels him in, mimicking the rumble of a jungle bass line. Bearded Boy answers her call, reverent as a glow stick, mouth stretched in a wobbly O of worship. At first he thinks the gnawing sensation in his toes is a sudden chill in the air, an errant piece of glass piercing skin. Too late, he sees the tent's teeth settle into his ankle, hears the wet crunch of blood and bone made snack. A cluster of crisp packets cheers as the tent jiggles back and forth, a frenzy of focused mastication. The victims' screams rang across the field with no ears to catch them. Thousands of lazy folk leave their fleeting weekend homes behind, now they're nothing but gristle in the guts of guerrilla retribution. A grim scene indeed, with a simple moral to heed: The only guarantee that you also won't be eaten is to take your tents away this festival season.
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