BANGING ON: twenty first century blues

By La Nonika

BANGING ON is a collection of poetry written largely on the hoof during the first two decades of the 21st Century.  It is a battle cry, a lament, a kick up the arse, a ritual and smirk with more than a hint

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fighting Talk
• Release date: Dec 21, 2025
• ISBN: 9781739127138

Book preview

If you want my opinion …

BANGING ON

Twenty First century blues

La Nonika

Fighting Talk

For those of us who died, and for those of us who didn’t, for the nine nights, the funerals and the wakes, the 50th birthdays, the divorces, the long years of recovery and the new horizons (or not as the case may be).

For those of us who never stopped believing and kept on living like it was all going be alright, whilst watching it all go to shit, powerless in our hopes and dream-like forays into self-built utopian transience.

It didn’t last.

It was never meant to.

We imagined, so beautifully in the clear bright belief that, first to invent rebellion, ours would be the last changes that needed making. That our stolen long weekends of escape and the joys remembered there would come home with us. That the love we made together would filter out from our open, bleeding hearts and wrap around our broken, shaking societies. Clearly, that didn’t happen.

We just got older and the status quo broke those of us who couldn’t be aligned. Chewed us up and spat us out, consuming those who could be salted to taste by the seductive spices of lies. The large majority reverted to type whilst wearing anti-establishment T-Shirts and lapping up the Government Kool Aid. Some lost hope and bought property. There are still a few left alive on the fringes, cried hoarse and cancelled. The mainstream learned to box clever and wears alluring alternative guise nowadays. Sucking in the little freshwater fish from rivulets of discontent. How passionately they dive into in the delusion that they are going against the flow, swim in schools through cavernous echo chambers reenforcing dangerous and destructive normalisation of the same old, same old undertow, in glittering, ecologically disastrous, rainbow costume. With digitally enhanced filters and evasive idioms extolled as a natural evolution of language. The new technology prettily masquerades the old dog’s old tricks as new ideas. Ah youth, how vulnerable she is to the attentions of the power generation.

To be honest, I didn’t even believe it at the time.

The age of Aquarius is, reportedly, dawned upon us, yet the new century’s Twenties have roared at us all in ways hitherto unimagined. I reel from the shock and am daily horror struck at the global state of play.

It is to the few that I dedicate this second collection.

The few who hold earth to be sacred mother to us all.

The few who honour her bodily gift of ourselves to be precious and perfect. The few who don’t believe a word of it, the few who will have none of it, the few who, privileged to hold fast to that which is and always will be, take pride and draw strength from being out on a limb ideologically. How bad can it get? We already lost everything, all we have left to us is our honour and thus we are invincible to everything but doubt in ourselves.

This is for my sisters and my brothers who are learning to watch their mouths, because they are used to watching their backs.

This is for truth, this is for reality, this is for, the de-platformed, the despised, the silenced and the shamed. Hang in there, the worst may be yet to come.

Unlike the works in my previous collection, these pieces are largely untried with an audience, thus all acknowledgements go to myself and the reclamation of my person from the all-consuming state of motherhood. I really didn’t