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Performance poet Hollie McNish writes a Letter to London

Dear London
Sometimes I feel like punching you in the face
Sitting directly on or bashing through your fence
Sometimes I like to pretend I've never heard of you
Like who? Where?
Puzzled face, eyebrows down, hands pressed to mouth
Thinking,
No, I don't think I know that one
London? Where's that then?
As if I have not heard a whisper of that London-something-place people say is the centre of our country
South in fact
It's not as central as all that
It seems Leeds may be more placed for that
London, yeah I know it
The place where nights are light up
where every decision ever made in government is written up
And the way rich people talk is held up by my Glasgow grandmas as the voice we should all strive for, the afternoon drama narrators of radio 4, they say the man down the street was taught to talk like that at private school and now gets paid a lot
The place where shops don't shut.
And which sometimes acts as though outside its East and West and North and South
which all look quite the same to me
is a black cloud full of small unimportant towns and villages where people sit and dream like hobbits driving tractors arrive school on horses, vote for BNP and spout small town racist thoughts
Backwards
Sometimes I think London thinks everyone outside its streets walk backwards
London, I work with you a lot.
You ask me to come to you to read my poems for gigs in clubs in theatres to meet and chat and I know immediately from your emails that it's you because you do not state the place
You are the only emailer I get that does not state the place, as if London is the default point from which all points relate
Dear Hollie, you say
Are you free to do a gig at this time on this date.
Dear Hollie
Are you free to meet up at this time on this date
And I love writing back to your London emails London
To ask where it will be?
Is that in Manchester, I say?
Or Glasgow maybe?
Where is it?
Just to remind you that not everyone meets up in just one city
London
I don't know how many times I have to tell people I'm not from you
Born in Reading, schooled in Newbury, nights in Thatcham
Now living in a flat in the back of a village
My shops have never been open late like yours
I love you London but some people here are scared of you
Of your theatres and museums and underground and people sprinting round and round and late night streets and late night crime and heaving busy city fuss
We have one bus
But London, I know you're scared of us.
Of places you have never been
Of smaller towns and village greens that that did not used to be the Queen's back garden
I pick blackberries on saturdays
At night there is not a sound outside my window and I wake up to the birds
There is no youth club
Or Arts Centre
Or Southbank workshop group
Or roundhouse spoken word
Poetry slams
Battersea
Writing retreats
One fish and chips, three pubs and fifty seven trees stand on my street
Perhaps one day you'd like to come and visit me.
Instead.
There's one bus.
If you're brave enough
Get on it.
Yours, Hollie.