Poem: Dub Take The Voodoo

A poem about the time we got stuck — out of our depth for so many reasons — at a Mad Professor gig. Nothing to do with the Mad Professor. Everything to do with us. So, a love poem then, basically…

Remembering the time we slept in the tent
while the Mad Professor played his dub set
and people with torches walked by as if
looking for lost children, which in some ways

wasn’t far off. They kept shining the light
in our eyes, they kept asking us to stand,
to move, to not be there. But we didn’t care.
It had been a long day, it had felt like weeks —

and I was on the run, technically. It was going
to be a long set of weeks, very much in a daze.
One stupid thing I’d done was shadowing me
like a fog. The grass being ripped and slipping

through my fingers. Time at a standstill,
the herbal speed forcing a headache; the world
felt like an amusement park I was blindly
stumbling through, and just stopping

when I felt like it , having my own fun
on the side. And you with your own worries —
believing they were going to bring the dogs
in next — they could catch us, you said.

They would hunt us. But now it’s all just
hazy memory, its own neurotic dub-plate.
We were young, we were stupid.
But we made it out alive.