Reading at LASWrites_IRL

I read my writing titled ‘Reflux’ at the first LASWrites_IRL event held in April 2026. As part of a line-up of other selected poets and writers, we all read our pieces from the installation in the gallery. It mimicked a bedroom, giving a very intimate atmosphere to each performance. I also had my painting titled ‘Reflux (To Find Something That Will Move Me, To More Than Just Tears)’ displayed in the installation, which I picked up to hold during my reading.

‘Reflux’ is an automatic writing piece I wrote around a situation I found myself in recently – my landlord has been living with me for an extended period of time (months), which has felt very unsafe and uncomfortable. In it I confess my yearning to belong in my room, in London, in the world. 

There was a great turnout and I thoroughly enjoyed being part of this event, listening to everyone’s pieces. It always feels vulnerable to read such an intimate piece out loud, and as soon as you read it out loud the work becomes something different… something with rhythm, something that starts to move on its own. I’m definitely going to experiment with this aspect of how writing can exist in this very different form, again.

Reflux

These days I just want to talk to myself, out loud, in my room, with the world as my audience. I want to speak in rhyme and reason. Could

they be opposites? Could they, at least, be friends? I look frantically in my notes, my romanticised lifeline, a clichéd cliché. I scoff. I find

anxious performers, one in all caps: ‘I AM NOT A FAILURE (at every turn)’.

So perhaps I am a failure at some, turns,

But as you all know there are some, things you can’t control, you can’t predict under moons, full,

and full, moons. This is the longest I’ve lived with a man in recent memory. It’s been 6 weeks.

To live with a sleeping giant is to tip toe around your waking hours

with a bead of sweat you call your own, desperate to fall

It’s to tie yourself into a small knot that you tell yourself you can undo later.

It’s to trip over, and under, and into, and most accurately, beside a despair that feels foreign, but not foreign enough to feign enough distance

in which you can speak to yourself out loud, in your room, with the world as your audience.

Of all the spaces I’ve inhabited, this is the strangest one. There is hope but also a distinct lack of it.

They overlap. They mingle, and fizz. That’s chemistry. That’s true love. I write love letters to not

one, but two inanimate objects. I look out my window and wish I were moved, or moving, at least,

like I’m on a train. I wished for a safe space but in London it can sometimes feel like a dream. I

want to belong, and find a pocket I can grow into, and under, and most accurately, beside.

I need space to digest when my mother tells me she’s scared she’ll die on the plane, departing,

tomorrow, and when I’m revisiting these trains, in my dreams, long ago. I can hardly recall them, I

think I was flying.

When a giant is where he’s not supposed to be, he rarely ever knows it – no actually, he does know

it, but he just doesn’t care. He just sleeps, and he just continues to breathe. and breathe, and breathe.

And I breathe, as he breathes, and I wonder which one of us will stop first.

I despair that this time has turned me bitter but it’s all I ever known, in this overlap, in this fizzed

out reflux of a man. and I challenge the audience to find something sweeter, brighter, something that

will move me, to more than just tears...

I am not a failure at every turn, just some, but that is because I am learning a new language, a new

way to speak, to move, to grace, to breathe. and I hope to god I

don’t recognise myself beside this disparaging despair

Ever Again.

He said to me, the other day, you only need 1 hour of sleep if you’re truly happy.

I think about how I’ve been sleeping.

I guess I am

Truly, Happy.