This Is the One Thing We Didn’t Want to Happen (notes from End of the Road Festival)

We arrived like pilgrims with plastic ponchos,
trading spreadsheets for mushrooms and sleep-deprivation,
hoping to lose ourselves between the trees
and maybe find something louder than our lives.

By Friday, the woods were singing.
Goat set the sky on fire—
masks on, minds off,
a ritual in distortion and holy noise.

We danced like summoned things,
like the stage was an altar,
like praying was a given.

Later, Sylvie Kreusch floated onstage
like a spell in silk—
half Kate Bush, half séance.
She sang and the air changed its shape.
I forgot my name,
but remembered every person I’d ever loved.

Someone yelled,
“This is the one thing we didn’t want to happen!”
and the sky broke,
and the tents collapsed,
and everyone laughed like it was scripted.
Perhaps it was.

We stumbled into a quiz by mistake—
2 grams deep and full of hubris.
Every answer, no matter the question:
“Roy Orbison.”
A performance art piece.
A disaster.
A moment of joy so dumb it felt divine.

A boy played cello in the folly, and
someone gave me an e for free.
I watched a band I’d never heard of
play the soundtrack to my future breakdown.
Five stars. Would definitely cry again.

The nights were velvet chaos—
lanterns and dope smoke,
a quiet woman painting planets on strangers’ faces
while a techno remix of SOS played somewhere deep in the distance.

When it ended, it didn’t.
We carried it home in our hair,
in the ache of leaving
in the way we now look at strangers
like they may also have been there,
beneath the fairy lights,
watching the world fall apart and then coalesce
ceremoniously.

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Listen

I

it roars fierce yellow
through the cracks –

acts ruderal, its inner
bracts: erect, intact

till pollinated, then
dies the beautiful death;

the Dandy Lion.

II

copious on fields that are
crossed to find drugs and
sex, the buttercup:
hold it close beneath the chin
should you find yourself
in-shake and yellowing, a stuttered
lover, an afternoon gin.

III

spined-caged-headless trunks
are protected from themselves
should they take root and blossom,
then make love to the neighbourhood.

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Listen

Sunburned gas-blue
I think I love you –
you’re cracked
anchored and abandoned

Your surname is sunk
beneath the silt and sand
but ‘Betty’ is aloft
Betty Blue I’ll call you

as dawn gleams
like mercury above you

almost afraid to rise.

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Listen

I ran from Ivan Allen
a monster of a boy
more a man.

I imagined him Russian
with a knowledge of tractors
and a black belt in everything.

He terrorised his teachers,
he darkened all corridors, and he
loomed like all preachers do.

So I moved through the half-built walls,
bare brick and scaffolding bones,
the air thick with cut wood and Ivan Allen ghosts.

A rust-bitten mixer growled – its drum still warm
I climbed inside, to hide and to see
how the world spins differently…

Out and dizzy I sat above
a deep concrete pit,
pools of rainwater laced with oil.

I dropped stones, watched the ripples
spread out like something waking,
My fear, our toil

I found a crowbar—
its heft a thrill in my palm.
I prised at doorframes,
tore them clear,
and shouted my name
into the void
to revel in the echo,
no one hears…

Later, I walked home,
pockets rattling with
bent screws
and the stolen heart
of a padlock.

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Listen

“I hate myself and I want to die”

Said Kurdt Cobain.
Now printed on ‘ethically-sourced’ cotton
Tees – £24.99.

Sizes S through XXL
The silent cry –
I hate myself and I want to die.

A candle that smells like pine
It’s called Teen Spirit (Emotionally Alive).
I hate myself and I want to die.

The Spotify playlist – “Hard Rock for Soft Times”
Track three – merely a sigh.
I hate myself and I want to die.

An influencer cries in a bathroom reel.
Ten thousand hearts reply: ‘same.’
I hate myself and I want to die.

My therapist asked if I’m monetizing pain?
Not quite yet. But I’ve drafted a line:
I hate myself and I want to die.

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