00:03Who would you like to talk about in respect to that?
00:07My mate Ali, who passed away when he was 25, and we were childhood friends.
00:12He would say things sometimes that caught you off guard as a nine-year-old,
00:16like profound existential things.
00:18You know what I mean? You're like 10 and you want to be 13,
00:20so you're trying to be a bit cooler than you are, kind of thing.
00:22And he just went, can we just be 10? We're 10.
00:25Like, can we just stop and just be 10?
00:26And I was like, who says that?
00:28You know what I mean?
00:28He wears that sort of access of awareness.
00:32Wisdom.
00:32Wisdom, yeah, yeah.
00:33Amazing parents as well, and family.
00:35But yeah, he's a beautiful guy.
00:41No flowers, please.
00:43Do not honour the place I died.
00:45Honour the places I lived.
00:46Paint hearts onto the gates of my primary school,
00:48and leave roses on my lover's bed.
00:50Fuck my ashes, spread sugar instead.
00:52Don't credit my poems, they were never mine.
00:54Don't visit my grave, visit my friends.
00:56Ask them about that time or that thing.
00:59They'll say I was kind and a bit of a prick.
01:02No flowers, please.
01:03Just seeds for my kids.
01:05You shouldn't notice I'm dead.
01:07If I lived whilst I lived.
01:11I think anger was actually probably my primary feeling.
01:14Yeah, I'm angry about that.
01:15I'm really angry about that.
01:16But there's not that anger to go, really.
01:18It's really odd to me that you're expected to be dignified in grief.
01:22I don't think you should have to have any dignity about your grief.
01:24There's something very profound about removing the pretense
01:27and the artifice of all of this, and actually reality in itself.
01:30I think that's what I like about Celebration Day as a concept.
01:32At the end of the day, everyone sort of needs to go,
01:33come, let's f*** stop.
01:34Let's stop.
01:35Let's have it out.
01:35I'm in so much pain.
01:36Are you in so much pain?
01:37I'm in so much pain.
01:37And I think in my poetry, in what I think Celebration Day is,
01:42there's a chance to be like, let's just stop a minute.
01:43Let's stop.
01:44Stop playing the game, because it's not serving us.
01:46And I think if we don't do that, it finds you anyway,
01:49and it finds you unawares, and that's when the harm happens,
01:53and the self-destructive behaviours can begin.
01:56That's what happens if you don't intentionally stop and say,
01:59I'm grieving, I need this time, I need this day, I need this space.
02:02So I think, yeah, I think Celebration is really beautiful.
Comments