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Fairies

Mike Stuart

This film-poem explores the uncomfortable revulsion felt by tourists and shoppers who pass the ubiquitous beggars and junkies that congregate around the Colston’s Tower area of St Augustine’s Parade, and asks whether they are so different from us, since they are merely obeying their appetites, having been sold the idea that consuming things will make us happy. Maybe we fear them for other reasons that go back into our childhood; maybe we are all junkies for one thing or another.

Read some of my other poems online.

Further Info | Transcript | Credits

Further Info

This story was created in the artist’s own time.

Transcript

There’s fairies at the bottom of my garden
Their darkened eyes twinkling out of the gloomy gleaming
Hungrily yearning their eyes full of feelings
Of unsated appetites of monocrome meaning
Flitting featherlike spiky through the shadows
Their faces sparkle with pixie dust sprinkles
Glimmering with starry sweaty oily dreck

Did I say fairies? I meant junkies
And its not really a garden more a patch of land
That enshrouds this block like a hand
In which this towering middle finger stands
Expressing its outrage at its own inelegance
A giant “f*ck you” against the omnipotence
That stares down at it unaware and seemingly uncaring
To see its children squandered thus
To wander nonplussed across the once plush but barren terrain
Looking for dogends or lost cash in vain
Knowing that they’ll never know home again
And endlessly trying to switch off the pain
Huddled in bundles in the dankest dark corners
Staggering bleary like lost drunken mourners
Pouncing on prey like there’s no relief
Tearing up fur with their shiny white teeth

Did I say junkies? I meant animals
Animals squirreling deeply in holes
Cute little animals with faces like voles
That flit through the spaces and into their holes
Not ever wondering if they have souls
Just eating to live and then living to eat
Nightime is garnished by the sound of their feet
Pattering scattering right up the street
Unconciously heeding to their every need
They were born to earn and they’re born to feed
And only survivors further their seeds
Only successful and full of blank greed
Led on thin leashes they’re dragged till they bleed
Drugged on the ice palace temples of spending
Running on treadmills made neverending
Running to earn their right to exist
To pay for the earth that’s under their feet

Did I say animals? I meant consumers
Eaters of vanities consumers of all the humours
Who humour their need to define themselves
Through consumer goods to express their wealth
So they too can breathe that lovely cool air
That encircles the models who look like they care
Really deeply about the clothes that they wear
The wind waving glamourously through manicured hair
Dangling their perfect progeny and heir
To the lifetyle choices that they have to bear
Their ordered lawn franchise of castles in air
With unkempt dark corners in dingly dell
For every nice heaven conceals a hell
Where the dark figures of night lurk and dwell
Waiting for nightfall when they can descend
Upon your abode and steal and upend
Your lifestyle they’re jealous as hell
For they too are under the corporate spell
And run on the hamster wheel like we do as well

Did I say consumers? I meant fairies

There’s fairies at the bottom of my garden.

Credits

All media not otherwise credited created by the story author, or permission obtained, used under copyright licence.

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