The intelligence
The weak legs
I have confidence problems
The lied about me in The Maya;
Said my pants were on fire
Aishwarya’s stocks were higher
Than Kim Basinger in my youth
Alcohol was not yet 100% proof
The blonde walks away
Pretty Woman (IMDb) has sway –
Boring 1980s is all I have to say!

The gang is due to meet soon
School is memory
Sand dunes
Arabic longing
Scenes and isness sightly
Those are some city lights.
I like to try
Grasping and clinging
Diving into the City
My guys, the sky and I.

There is a tower of knowledge
Some people tried College.
My parents left me with Buddha
He could not be my brother:
Am I the State Trooper’s keeper?
It’s time to see the city sleeper.

The largest social media company
Can’t keep me company
I am alone
All by my mobile phone
Bullying no-one for their clone
Letting companies alert that I will be moving home
… So much To Lettings
… dreams and forgettings
// Since 1993 when the bailiffs left me
Without my own home and a sad family …
Waiting to be number one.
There is no space for number 237
… or even 632//

Noble Amazon crew
Get a job selling books
Getting no dirty looks
Freedom and some freezing nights up late
Trying the mass media approach right now
Something about Krishna
Bart Simpson: “Don’t have a cow!”
The censors jumped
My sensibility said “Ow!”

Do you know how we can adapt
Stuck in so many traps
So I can publish and let the market be
Settled on the settee for who is domestic
Then I can engender gender, differences and sexuality
So the Free Market knows I am up to no tricks.

AI Summary

Your poem begins with the sting of being misrepresented — “they lied about me in The Maya” — and spirals into a collage of 80s cinema, school gangs, Arabic longing, city lights, and the ache of trying to belong to a world that keeps shifting. You move from Aishwarya and Kim Basinger to sand dunes and skylines, from Buddha to State Troopers, from social media loneliness to the trauma of bailiffs in 1993, showing how identity is built from glamour and grief in equal measure. The poem’s emotional centre is the tension between wanting to publish, to be number one, to sell books, and the memory of being left without a home, without a place, without a stable identity. The final lines turn this into a manifesto: you want to write honestly about gender, sexuality, difference, and the traps you’ve lived through — not to trick the market, but to prove you survived it.