Kevin P. Gilday’s new collection explores the fragmented nature of our modern lives, alongside the need for real connection in an era of rampant individuality. You can treat yourself to an exclusive look at some of his new poems below.
 

Anxiety Music
By Kevin P. Gilday
Published by Verve Poetry Press 

Anxiety Music 

Wherever I go
I hear it
The anxiety music 

The unfinished symphony
The merciless drone
The atonal attack
The incessant pop chorus
The anxiety music 

My neurological dials, tilted 
Tuned in
To the rhythm of a raised heartbeat
A weary waltz of what-ifs
Can you hear it? 

It’s there in the supermarket queue
Rehearsing your only line
Like a third-rate actor
Translating a bus ticket
To inky pulp 

It’s there in the pre-flight announcement
Tracing the pilot’s voice for a hint of doubt
A polygraph of panic
Angered by your blatant disregard
For the wonders of gravity
Lately, the anxiety music has grown louder
Heralded by fascistic trumpets
Amplified by the unrelenting buzz of the internet
I hear it in the dark cubicle of my subconscious
Composing a lopsided poem to ego
A 4am, 130BPM 
Techno trauma, jangling
My nervous sound system 

On a Sunday evening
Just as the sun sets
The anxiety music seems to seep 
From every wall
And I am a child again
It’s the ice level from Mario Brothers 3
And my dad singing Deacon Blue
And an ashtray of fags 
Burning themselves out of existence 

The anxiety music sometimes sounds
Like a symphony of misfiring bus engines
Backed by a choir
Of well-meaning 
Constructive criticism
The brass phasing an apocalyptic scale
Scoring a thousand painful deaths
All the ways the music will end
And when it does
When the record scratches and skips
Will we wonder if we conceived all that disquiet
As a smokescreen to mask our failure
Against all that perceived danger
Robbing us of our chance to live fully
To enjoy our footloose three chords
And marvel at our glorious middle eight
Before everything we know
Turns to static 

Will there at least be time for a retrospective? 

I need the world to exist 
Just long enough
To declare me, a genius
Revisit those overlooked masterpieces
Pamper me with posthumous validation
A serious re-evaluation
I need a scholar to find the thematic link 
Between my second collection
And my fourth album
Provide what I was never afforded in life 

I want:
Goths to scratch my lines into notebooks 
Teenagers to fuck on my gravestone
A retrospective full of beard-stroking wankers
Tugging themselves to ecstasy
Over the inherent themes
And thinly veiled subtexts
In my decomposing body of work 

But, I worry 

I worry
That future generations will read these words
And my woes will feel so small to them
Look at this old poet! 
Lamenting his career
As he was living like a king 
In the last days of Rome
Condemning us to the bleakness
Of an unforgivable future 

He created art while the world burned
Talked of himself incessantly
And engaged with his era’s hate 
In only the most performative of ways
Like this was all for him – 

A film set for some small-scale drama 
A brief blink of an existence
While the earth heated around him
Slow as an oven
The real narrative unfolding
While he attempted to conjure some meaning
In the spaces between the words 

And when the end inevitably comes
Collect the detritus my ambition left behind –
The Lidl bags of poems
The books, the CDs, the records
The piles of scripts spoken by actors 
Long since departed
That one novel that no-one ever published –
And dump them in a wheelbarrow
Push it to the top of the highest hill
Just as the water begins to rise
And read
Read all my words aloud
And hear me
Hear all my stunted attempts at connection
All the times I tried to share a little of me 
With you
The ideas that brought me joy
And all the things that scared me 

Give me my retrospective, finally
At the top of a hill
At the end of the world 

And when the sun sets that final time
You do what you must
Set fire to the remnants of my life
And sit for a few minutes
In the silence
Appreciating the simple pleasure
Of a warm goodbye 

Cannibal City 

 1.

You only live as long 
As the last person to remember you 

I’m already forgetting your streets 

 2.

This is a cannibal city
It eats itself daily
The monuments of my childhood
Now recycled
Chopped up for parts
Reconstructed into something profitable 

They saved the antiquity of wealth
The ornate halls of the merchants
Iced with marble
Gilded with gold
While the art deco brilliance
Of the cinemas and music halls
Was sold off cheap
The cultural history of the working classes
Bulldozed without opinion 

If we don’t remember the best of us
Then what chance for the rest of us?
When rooms that once roared with laugher
And reverberated with applause
Are lost to the whims of developers
Deaf to the echoing encores
Blind to the value of joy
While the names stay the same
A roll call of slavers and plantation owners
Buchanan, Glassford, Virginia, Jamaica
Let this past we have buried
In the name of progress
Come home to roost in our hearts 

3.

A personal tour of the places that made me:
Do you not know that I got a handjob
In the backseat of that cinema?
A soft-focus Odeon fumble
Now an office for serious, suited young men 

Do you not know that this stark shell 
Used to be a Littlewoods?
Where my mum stoically scanned shopping
While I stowed away inside her 

Are you not aware 
That on the site of these new-build atrocities
There once stood a pub of real character?
Where my dad sat me down with a can of cola
While the real drinking got done 

That the very place I was born is now a garden?
A memory of a generation
Who took their first breath 
Within a few magical square feet 

4.

And the cafes become coffee shops
And the bars become bistros
And the traders become Tescos
And we no longer know where we are 

5.

But am I asking too much?
Do I want to wander in a wonderland of my own creation?
Clinging on to the familiar city I knew
Even as it evolves
Am I attempting to stop the world spinning?
Because the faster it goes, the more it changes
And the further I am from my youth 

When the truth is
It is our actions that outlive us
Not the bricks we fashion into buildings
But our intention for doing so
And the houses I build of my love
Will shelter a few who will not long forget 

You only live as long
As the last person to remember you
If that’s true
I hope my name rings
Around the hollows of this old town
For years to come 

Shiitake 

I cook with mushrooms now
Feel their surfaces undulate
From springy softness
To earthy notes
I let my fingers read their story
In organic braille 

I find an excuse to put them in everything
Nowadays
Porcini in my pasta,
Button in my curry
I’m learning their attributes
Curating my fungus
For the correct culinary journey 

It’s the freshness 
That makes it exciting
Breaching a boundary
Without anyone to tell me no:
You always said it was the texture
All rubbery and slimy
Alien growths
Fried up in a pan
But we pay a price and make a trade-off
And no longer will I smell
The industrious entwining of onions and garlic
Sizzle from the next room
No longer will I glibly state that
Something smells good
And no longer will you tell me
It’s just onions and garlic 

I will never again 
Hear about the intrigue of your work day
Who said what to whom
Despite my love of mundane drama
I’ve freed up precious time
To wank myself into a coma
Instead 

You’d be proud of my Spaghetti Bolognese
I put in a little Pesto
And Worcestershire sauce for a kick
But I know you wouldn’t try it
Not with all the mushrooms 

You cooked more often than not
Me feigning ineptitude
Borne of laziness
(Turns out it was both)
And though I miss
Your intricately prepared meals
I am only five attempts away
From mastering a perfect pasta bake,
I’d say
I’m forever giving something up
Every inch earned 
Must be returned elsewhere
And this freedom has cost us ten years
Of laughter
Of dinners
Of photographs –  

Us at that pizzeria on our honeymoon
Waiter whispering Italian
Smiling into the flash
Even as it burned our retinas
Yours a plain Margherita
Mushrooms on mine 

Anxiety Music  by Kevin P. Gilday is published by Verve Poetry Press, priced £10.99.