Canterbury, Wise Word Fest and Emotional Cellulite

I spent yesterday with five awesome poets in Canterbury for the Wise Words Festival doing pop-up poetry performances. The weather was a bit... problematic, and in between showers, we ended up in cafes reading to receptive (and, mostly, dry) audiences at their tables.

High on camaraderie and caffeine, somewhere in our conversations, Grazia magazine's article on 'emotional cellulite' came up (as discussed on this blog) and it sounded too much like a joke for me not to write about it. I'm sure either Vanessa Kisuule or Emma Jones will write proper poems on this. In the meanwhile, I set myself the challenge of drafting my own response to this nonsense while walking down the old streets of Canterbury, and read it out on the spot. I may come back to this and redraft it, but it was a lot of fun doing a quick free write and throwing it out onto the streets immediately.


EMOTIONAL CELLULITE

Do you suffer from emotional cellulite?

Are your chakras lopsided or incorrectly aligned?

Is you spirituality sagging?

Is your third eye wrinkled?

Are you baggy around your relationship line?

Do you need to grab a handle on love?

And are your love handles forming

a barrier to your creative success?

Do you feel excessively hopeless?

When did you last detox from your anxiety?

Are you dieting on a widening variety

of self-help guides, celebrity-focused gossip

columns and gloss over your shoulder magazines?

Do you feel bloated?

Do you feel wanted?

Do you feel haunted?

Are you exercising your demons regularly?

Or are you dragging your ambitions

through the treadmill of bottom-shelf mediocrity?

Are you bored?

Are you broke?

Are you psychocynically bankrupt?

Are your hollow?

Or is your mind wallowing
fat with greedy thoughts

that only liposuctive remedies can erase?

Are there red circles on your self-image

that need to be diminished?

Are you a half-finished product

of your own disappointment?

Are you lost?

Are you winning?

Are you thinning out?

Are your prospects slim enough
to slip into superficial tedium?

And now you can fit into that medium-sized red dress

have you been left with the scars

of emotional cellulite?

Are you sufficiently stretching
your chakras?
Are they inverted or incorrectly aligned...?