I attended a pro-Democracy rally in Westminster Square in the early months of 2022. There were around 30 of us, on a cold, damp Saturday. While I'm angry about the way the way the public are being treated by the current government, it seemed very British that we'd only confront the powers-that-be if the sun was out.

I wrote this poem in April of 2022, as I was coming to grips with the repercussions of the pandemic and my continued sense of detachment, which in many ways recalled my experience of the year following my father's death. In a broader sense, this poem addresses survival, and the sacrifices therein.

I was born tender. As a kid, one of the things I desired most was a father's love, and seeing my father come home drunk and unconcerned most nights is perhaps the most traumatic experience of my childhood. But Love was the inspiration behind this poem— those little things he did that I almost didn't see; that were beautiful in themselves.

Well this poem was written and inspired by the amount of insecurity that is eating up my hometown. So I felt the need to put pen unto paper and meander every which way towards freedom, towards safety. I needed something to hold onto, so I felt the need to explore home as water, its healing effects. Home as water; its ability to drown.

This is sci-fi daydream about needing some hope and trying to generate it. It comes from the reliance we have on tech and how we look to it for more than it can give us. It's also about short-circuiting and disrupting the flow of things, trying to get something better all the time, and confronting a full stop. And I suppose it is about working out when enough is enough; when do we give up on something? I think of Borges when I read this poem.

On the first walk after the invasion of Ukraine, the landscape I had got to know and love even more during Lockdown, suddenly looked more vulnerable: overlaid with images of devastation. In the face of tyrants the foundations of peace in Europe, established at the Treaty of Versailles, are as fragile as the products of civilisation... as illusory as mirrors.

I lost several friends in 2022. They were all young men who died due to the COVID-19 virus, suicide and other health related complications. Now that I work full-time in East Port-of-Spain and work actively to intervene in the increasing violence and gang wars which afflict communities, I have become more conscious about the precariousness of human life. Many, especially young men, die and 'disappear' in our communities. I grieve for them all.

This prose poem is a tribute to migration and its irreparable disruption. I moved to the UK a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic and it has been an interesting time. This poem tries for a humorous take on what a model immigrant is. I doubt that they exist.

'Boy cut' is a work about body and sexuality, gender and power. It's about how I felt when I cut my hair age 19, the invisibility it gave me and therefore power and liberation to exist outside the sexual economy. The work asserts the body as a private space, not one managed by others. It's about freedom from systems that state sexuality has to be on show for women to have value. It's about how I saw my body then. How I see it now.

This is a protest poem. It was inspired--although I wish it hadn't been--by HM Government's cavalier attitude to its role, in particular the blatant disregard for its own Covid regulations and unwillingness to admit these errors; also the Carlton Club scandal, and PM's shocking attitude to discipline among party members; lastly, his resignation from office, baby son in shot, with a failure to accept responsibility for his own poor leadership.

This poem pays tribute to the late musician and carrier of the Belize Kriol musical tradition known as Brukdown music. It offers a sense of the instruments and sounds involved in this genre while providing a historical and cultural context to its development as a form of resistance. The performance is accompanied by the musician Alexander Evans who recorded the background music.

After Christmas lockdown 2020. We met up and had a Xmas dinner, in the yard of an old school, halfway between Rhondda and London where our family live. After presents were opened the kids pretended the van was a sleigh. As they left we waved and felt sad because we'd missed them leaving only their names on tags left behind

The tanka form was learned at a facebook group called The Daily Haiku which provides daily prompts. I aim to respond to the prompts five days a week and I prefer to unify my responses during this working week. I consider that this poem has four themes my past working life, my relationship, climate chaos and the idea of a race towards something/someone special.

Although widely referenced in popular culture as a victim of Big Oil, corruption, and pollution, Ogoniland remains one of the most beautiful and biodiverse ecosystems in the world. However, chronic oil spillages and waste dumping is turning Ogoniland into a living hell for millions of its indigenes. We dig for the 'black gold' to give us freedom and comfort but who can liberate us from the abyss it has created.