Jack Dean started rapping in an atrocious punk-rap crossover band aged 15. Since then he's calmed down a bit, got a girlfriend, and carried his love of shouting at strangers to many places. Jack takes the hip hop medium he grew up with, goes out with it gets it drunk and pushes it down the high street in a shopping trolley full of fireworks at 4am. Maybe. Poems for Grown Up Children is his debut collection and is very much 21st Century poetry for 21st Century people. People who have grown up with technology and take it for granted. People who take the cacophony that backdrops our lives and hang it up as curtains. This is poetry infused with different beats. Poetry remixed and remade and slapped into a mix tape and taken out for a night on the tiles. Matched with the perfect complement of Hannah Jane Copestake's illustrations this is poetry polished with craft and complexity that will be appreciated by the grown up child in us all. £7.99 incl. UK P&P from www.burningeye.co.uk

2. Poems for Grown Up
Children
Jack Dean
Illustrated by Hannah Jane Copestake
Burning Eye

3. Copyright © 2013 Jack Dean
Illustrations Copyright © 2013 Hannah Jane Copestake
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means without the prior written consent of
Burning Eye Books, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of bind-
ing or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This edition published by Burning Eye Books 2013
www.burningeye.co.uk @burningeye
Burning Eye Books
15 West Hill, Portishead, BS20 6LG
ISBN 978 1 90913 620 5
Printed in Scotland by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

4. CONTENTS
9 Outfield
10 There Will Be Blud
12 Flat in Tower Hamlets, Feb 2012
14 Front of House
18 Snuggles
19 Quixotic
21 Oubliette
23 Waves, or a Dramatic Reading of a Hangover
25 My Artist Friend
26 The Magic Schoolbus
28 Some Advice
30 Drinking Game
31 Excessively Urban Fox Goes for a Stroll
32 Mix Tape
34 ACE Grant Application

5. 37 Dysphasia
40 Daisy
41 Global Tragedy Through the Eyes of a 12 Year Old
42 Distance
43 Vulnerability
44 Tattoo
45 Nice Things
46 Brizzle
48 At the Door (Remix)
49 Choices
50 Constellations
52 Cloudbase
54 Conclusive Evidence
56 Metaphor, or, At Some Point I Will Get a Real Job
58 Willow Man

7. Outfield
Past deep cover point he stands
tracing the row of fence-post boys on the gentle slope.
Today, he is all love handles and asthma
stowed outfield like a stained jumper.
But one day, he will see the red dot
carving up the cloud-woven firmament
and, spurred on by heathen shouts from a distance
will run backwards to catch it.
Through the school, out through the town,
backing away from shrinking childhood spires,
through university, past weeping girlfriends,
along the cynical gaze of employers,
to a house in Devon by the coast,
hands outstretched by a cobwebbed window.
Out in the field where they lay him
a quiet, leathery thud will mark the ground.
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8. There Will Be, Blud
Let there be light.
Let there be paper lanterns fluttering across motorways
for you to navigate to unseen places by.
Let there be mobile phone screens waving
like handheld stars outside clubs.
Let the insomniac tide of storefront radiance
flow sweeping over backend britons.
Let the hipster angels stay flapping into the dawn,
heads taped to speakers,
solemn in prayers to synth lines.
Let us gather in messy living rooms and
drink improbable homemade cocktails and
watch rubbish movies and
pause it and
say: “this bit, this bit right here,
this is a total lolocaust bruv.”.
Let us stop poking and innuendo-ing and prevaricating about gen-
der and just have sex,
lots of mad, sweaty nutritious sex,
until it stops being such a fucking hang up for everyone.
Let the tendons of buildings echo back understanding
until we can finally make cities inhabitable,
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9. until babies run Cribbs Causeway,
until matadors parade the bullring
and churches bleed gypsy jazz from pulpits.
Let the Five AM Maniacs bring their stubble and stimulants outside
and take in the vast, pointless, stupid
gorgeousness of it all,
feel how every breeze is a poem,
how every headlight is a sonata,
so you don’t always have to worry about
tacking meaning on to things like
tying waistcoats to snow leopards.
We have been tagged by the teleology police since day one,
but it’s our century to fuck up,
so let us throw those anklets to the milky way
and dance like socially awkward, caucasian pieces of meteor.
Let there be knowledge and wisdom and donuts,
before they wicked-witch us into grownups.
Let the bible of my peers be
as submerged in maybes
and drowned in don’t knows
as this flip-flopping age of jesters deserves.
There may be trouble ahead:
fuck it, let’s remix it.
11

10. Flat in Tower Hamlets, Feb 2012
From this angle
the building is an advent calendar,
psalms of private lives popping up in the night.
17a: the Hendersons come back from Dvorjak
and spin a 1950’s bubble of coupley bliss
out of wine, cheese and cufflinks.
52: Mr Davids, a neanderthal clump of hair
stands naked as mountains
rootling for a beer.
36b: two drab teenage aliens
linked to Xbox mothership
stare gauntly, planning the invasion
as the lights flicker out
a tiny Bangladeshi girl caked in glitter and streamers
runs up every stair
to her dad on the top floor, shouting again and again:
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