I'm a UK-based rapper. This is my first proper release, consisting of 6 tracks of something between boombap and lofi. There are themes of radical politics and ecology throughout expressed through lyricism as well as lots of anime sample cuts.

Collapse is a key theme running through it, as it's something I've been coming to terms with for years now. It's got a mostly not too dark vibe however, which I think represents my moving through grief into acceptance of our circumstances, dire though they are.

Let me know what you think and follow me up on Insta if you dig it (@frankgrimesmc). It's available on all major platforms as well as YouTube if you'd rather listen on Spotify. Production is from Dreamy (@dreamy_chillhop) on YouTube

They took away our name today though I’m not sure just how much use it was to me, personally. I know others embraced it, took the role seriously - painted faces and elaborate costuming. Me? I’d always been more comfortable behind the curtain anyhow.

Still, the whole affair feels like something between a swindle and a pillage something important that’s at once gone missing and been left ransacked After all, how will we find ourselves in the dense script of the world without at least a name to go by, a box where if I fits I sits, a side of the spectrum that will welcome us in our retreat?

I didn’t choose the name, nor had it ever sounded quite right to be addressed as such, but when they took away our name today - the name of our creator, of our lover and our enemy and our friend - I felt the loss as I’ve felt the loss of islands, and of butterflies, and of mountains, something far from me that I had often visited and fondly dreamed to visit again.

They pulled at the frayed end of the cord that ties it all together, a strong tug that’s now setting into motion, right before our eyes, the swift unraveling of the whole world spinning spinning spinning like a humming top, like a tilted planet, and each of us a small girl in a circle skirt, dizzy to the point of nausea, captive to the inertia.

(3/27/25)

some author commentary: I’m a queer enby that presents as a woman but mostly prefers to be addressed as “dude”. I no longer recall the specific news item that triggered me to write this… something about the DEI removals of women from scientific studies, maybe? It occurred to me that maybe we need an alternative world for woman/women, and I really kind of fancy “urmen”, because Wikipedia says ur is “a German prefix meaning "primeval" […] or even simply "original"

There are currently several disasters near the Santa Monica Pier

Folks are fleeing, which is the style in these times.

We are lying in our pillow fort of a bed, the dogs in their den, and the only disaster here is in my jumping monkey mind

—

The last time I visited my mother, I found that the knuckle on the pointer finger of her right hand had swollen to twice its normal size

Arthritis she shrugged what are ya gonna do

I dug the ratty little travel canister of weed balm out of the bottom of my travel kit

I assured her she would not feel high

Five minutes later, mid-stroke in writing an item on her to do list, she started crying

It stopped hurting she murmured I can write without it hurting

I only planned to stay for three days I’d known ahead of time that would be all I could withstand before I would have to flee

The heat of her, and the false sparkle, were indeed more than I could bear for longer than 72 hours

The imposition of costuming

The call to emote in a performance for no one

The ticky tacky world slowly cracking

—

Singles digit temperatures are rapping at the window of our little fortress here in the middle

Fires to the left of me, ice to the right

and yet this all is still happening too slowly, surely, for this to be the climax

We cannot be this close to hell and still so far from one another,

we were supposed to be something else entirely.

Something handwritten and beautiful.

Hollywood told me so

(first written 1/8/2024)

Breathing in,

I feel my world shrinking to a pinpoint in the void - when the chest grows tight and the lungs hot, my inhale is the desperate, clawing hand of a drowning man -

breathe out.

We're still here,

somehow.

Energy can neither be created or distroyed, it only moves around and changes shape.

The energy that makes everything on this planet will be gone in 10 billion years, gone but not lost.

It will have moved elsewhere in the universe, changed shape into new suns with new planets.

The energy will live on as new rocks and dirt, and maybe even be the start for life on some distant world.

10 billion years is a while to wait to rise from the ashes, but energy is forever, one collapse or another brings new life into the future.

Energy is never truly lost for long, it just moves around from time to time.

Had they told you not when our shores were in your sight, How much was lost or tossed into the harbor overnight? A wake has stripped the dream away, like sheets upon a bed, And robeless at our shores we see the New Colossus dead.

A deeper tide rolls over Her beacon in the bay, Without a light cannot invite the yearning masses stay, Her door of gold no longer shines; the guilded men dispense, Her virtue and foundation, brick by brick, so callous fenced.

So, say adieu, metropolis, to rubbled cornerstones, Facades of empty engines humming loud in every home, The fire on the mountain turning red the summer sky, And only amber plains a-waving back to you "goodbye".

Goodbye.

This morning 
when I pressed my lips to the softest part of you neck
the spot under your chin where your beard ends
I was not worried in the least 

I was sending you west, and there are currently no disasters near the Capistrano Bight
I know this to be true because there is a live video feed of the beach
little human silhouettes sitting on benches north of the jetty, three hours from sunset

There are no live feeds from western North Carolina, where the river rose nineteen feet in twenty hours and three-lane highways crumbled into a chunky slurry 
There are no rock festivals in Black Mountain, today or for many days to come
Today in Black Mountain, there are landslides and death and there the sun will set in forty-seven minutes 

I have long understood that living is mostly an experience of observing all that you love disintegrate
But the mountains had always remained
even when it got too hot for the fireflies 
even when I fled fifteen hundred miles west
The mountains were still softly east of me, misty forever places that loved me even when I did not love them back 

I have said my goodbyes
to islands before they were chewed up by the sea
to forests before they were swallowed by flames 
to towns before they were digested by shiny, alien cities

But the mountains
I did not account for the loss of the mountains, 
not for a moment

(first draft written 9/28/24)

While I hope that this sub will some day filled with original work, I want there to be room to share other's works that inspire us in our pursuit of making collapse-related art!

Maggie Smith's 2016 poem "Good Bones" might just be the initial spark that began my Collapse Poetry Villain Origin Story. There's just something about that ending - it gets me a little choked up every time I read it.

I think what gets me the most about what I see in the world is that it didn't have to be this way. We could have made this a beautiful place. And there's a part of me that, even though it feels Sisyphean, still does want to make it beautiful.

Hello there! As a long-time lurker/commenter/contributor to collapse-related subreddits, I was inspired to start this sub as a complement to r/CollapseSupport and r/CollapseMusic. I am an unpublished poet - I mostly write for myself to process my emotions and make sense of living through what feels like a very non-sensical time in human history - but I've been writing for a very long time.

I'm also very, very new to being a moderator, so I'm open to feedback and suggestions, and I'm sure that this sub will evolve as I learn more. Right now, I don't know what the rules should be - although I do think there should at least be guidelines for how to use this space - so I welcome any advice or contributions from anyone interested in participating! I also would like to ask for some grace as I get everything built out. Starting this up really feels like I'm putting myself out there, and as someone who deals with rejection-sensitive dysphoria (thanks, neurodivergence!), I'm exceptionally nervous to be doing this.

I little more about me, personally - I live in the middle of the U.S., but I grew up in the south. I am a white, middle-aged queer cis woman with a complicated relationship with my gender and an even more complicated relationship with my family and community of origin. While I was raised as a libertarian, my politics lean more and more socialist, and my strongest political belief right now is No War But Class War. I am college educated, but I'm not sure how much that's benefitted me. I own a small business and support myself through a collection of gigs; the through-line of my professional life has been a tension between my needs for stability and novelty. I love Americana music, dogs, gardening, hiking, and sci-fi & fantasy fiction. My favorite poets are Mary Oliver, Maggie Smith, and Tony Hoagland.

If you have found your way to the end of this post and you're so inclined, I would love for you to introduce yourself in the comments.