Naomi is a performance artist merging the circus with
storytelling and poetry. She creates pieces that incite riotous acts of joyful disobedience
celebrating empowerment and rebellion. Naomi has self published a first collection and
regularly runs creative writing workshops online and in the South East of the
UK as well as hosting performance poetry events.
Gobbess
At what point did we become afraid of reality?
We’re more palatable, somehow, as manic pixie
dream girls and we were
Busy burning brightly
Trying to tell the world that we were free
But lately it’s occurred to me
That maybe the witch hunters had just got in
our dreams.
See what is it about ourselves that we are just
so damn afraid of?
What is it about you lately that the world has
got you hating?
Got you feeling like you’ve always got to
constantly be creating?
Got to swallow down your humanness so being
alive in all its strangeness feels just like suffocating.
On every street corner there’s an order that
you should smile more.
Lobotomise, self criticise
Until you forget what you are here for.
I want to be in the dirt, face down snuffling
for truffles like a pig. Not a xing goddess. Not a Maiden, but a pig.
Snout first soaking in the muck and the mire,
rooting out what precious gems have been burnished in the fire and buried deep
for us to find in all our stupid humanity.
Beyond the kind and the irreverent and the world’s blustering insanity.
I don’t want to be a deity if it means I have
to keep my hands clean.
Because from what I’ve seen
Divinity lives everywhere you’re brave enough
to see it.
It lived in my grandmother labelling her
sockets and plugs-
A quiet kind of alchemy
Her hands wrapped around a mug.
The way she wielded a power drill every time
that we moved house.
It lives in the hands of a farmer I know
freeing the foot of a fox caught in a trap
With her weather worn fingers and an axe
strapped to her back.
I saw it in my friend who took her paintbrush
and cleaned the webs from the wings of a struggling bumblebee-
This endeavour scoffed at by some in the room.
But she knew the secret- that our time here is
only worth anything if all of us are
free.
And they say I’m in the ‘mother’ stage of this
Three Headed Gobbess phase-
The way women’s bodies have always been
subdivided, indexed, ranked and then erased-
And I don’t know what it is I’m nurturing but I
think it might be rage.
But this thing that I’m growing seems to be a
lot to do with earthing.
Being messy and unsightly, I’m giving names to
what I’m birthing.
Because divinity and holiness aren’t about
restrained purity
They’re in the hands of the woman at the food
bank who cleans and makes the tea.
Cracks
Who are we when nobody is watching?
What are we but the grit and grain
Rolled and polished under the shell
Of the stories we tell about ourselves?
Our footsteps were once rich forest deep
Now we’re walking these streets
And I’m meant to be older now
But I still hold my breath when I skip paving
stones.
Boom box, busy streets and broken locks
This city is full to the brim
With flashing fluorescent smiles
And see-through skin.
Plastic epiphanies
Grease wrapped
Fast tracked
Another Amazon parcel
But not robed in rainforest splendour.
And the kids were yelling
Telling us for years
But we don’t listen.
Instead we just cup our hands to our ears.
Press our faces to the walls
Of buildings and stories
That have grown too tall.
We are too many.
Too many questions
About trickle down economics
So I bite my lip
Fold origami cranes out of old bus tickets
And try not to step on the cracks.
And the men in suits are up there
Looking down
Just shifting their weight.
A business lunch, or a trip to the moon
Plate piled high-
It’s just another play-date.
And I don’t know exactly what it’s going to
take
For us to believe that our borders are
Imaginary and the hour is
Getting late.
Your bedtime story read aloud
In the voices of old white men.
They’re reading from an ancient book
But they’re also the one’s holding the pen.
While they throw toys from their towers
Over the shape of invisible things
They’re pouring poison in your ears
To keep you from believing.
And if you keep splitting the atom
Maybe you’ll find what you already
Knew to be true.
That this whole world has many layers
And the divine already lives in you
And you’re not here
To decide that everything belongs to you
When it’s all borrowed anyway
And the sun rises each day brand new.
There’s always been gaps beneath the
Fence for the wild ones to climb under
And seedlings growing through
Pavement cracks with voices of rolling
Thunder.
So on a day when there’s so much to do
And so little time for play
Will you remember who you really are
Put your hands back in the earth
And turn this dirt to clay?
On The Morning of Voting
I'm getting up early for all the people who
couldn't.
I rise in the dark emboldened by the voices of
those who came before me
Because this may just be paper and I like to
think outside the box.
But we've been standing empty handed in the
fields praying for a harvest for too long.
And they've been pissing on us and calling it
rain for some time now
That we forgot to question why the crops
weren't growing.
Chopped down our forests and carved us into
chess pieces that they divide
But won't conquer because we have our hands
deep in the dirt now.
And if you think your voice is insignificant
then
You have not seen how the smallest creatures
create their cathedrals.
It's a mess. Things are farcical. Life like a
ripe piece of Halloween satire.
TV barking like a dull eyed bear with boulders
for fists.
Meanwhile the tide is rising and it's
threatening to take back the land.
And we small huddle of fools stand gazing at
the sky.
But occasionally we look into each others
faces,
We make a life raft from each others limbs,
We sail into luminous waters on Wednesday
And transcend velocity at weekends.
A girl on the bus smiles right into the middle
of you
And you see old ladies laughing
Small dogs don't understand the stock market.
In the end, like them, we're all just
chasing our own tails.
But trees still get fatter on a full moon and
We are made of the same sap.
A murmuration that would carry us, too,
South for winter following the pull of planets.
While crickets rub their legs together in the
long grass.
A man on the checkout comforts a teenager
And in the park someone is feeding the birds.
We are grains of sand that snag
On the fabric of each others dreams-
White water rafting
The spin cycle rendering all of us; laundry.
Ultimately our colours all bleed into one
On a warm wash.
And I can taste familiarity in a stranger's
walk.
Sometimes.
There are fires raging and monsters
Living in all of our bellies but
Some days
You see hugs instead of handshakes
Or a grown-up riding a scooter to work.
