Poet David Lee Morgan

David Lee Morgan – Poet, Performer, Translator

David Lee Morgan is a Berlin-born poet and musician raised in the United States and currently based in London. A dynamic and provocative voice in contemporary performance poetry, Morgan is the winner of the London Slam, the UK Slam, and the prestigious BBC Slam Poetry Championship. His work is known for its fiery intellectualism, passionate delivery, and bold engagement with themes of science, love, and revolution, as showcased in acclaimed solo shows like Science, Love and Revolution, performed internationally and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Morgan holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and is a longtime member of the Writers Guild of Great Britain, where he has also served on the Executive Committee. His poetry, whether on stage or in print, fuses the rigour of academic inquiry with the immediacy and urgency of spoken word, often blurring the boundaries between art and activism.

A notable facet of Morgan’s oeuvre is his deep engagement with global revolutionary literature. His spoken word interpretation of Bidrohi (The Rebel), the iconic Bengali poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam, stands out as a passionate tribute. Though not a Bengali speaker, Morgan undertook a painstaking, word-by-word exploration of the text using digital tools and cross-referencing sources to preserve the original’s lyrical energy and defiant spirit. He aimed to capture the musicality and fire that first drew him to Nazrul’s work, ensuring authenticity not just through research, but through the support and scrutiny of his Bengali poet peers.

Poetry by David Lee Morgan
Here, we are proud to share one of David Lee Morgan’s powerful poetic works with our readers, a vivid example of his fiercely intelligent, emotionally charged style that has captivated audiences around the world.

What Is To Be Done

The revolution will not come until it has pierced your heart

Until every cruelty and injustice
No matter who it is done to
Feels as if it were done to you
Until you are naked, open wide
Wounded by every homeless cry
A mother to every hungry child
A native son to every tribe
Stranded in the forest flame
Swallowing smoke and tears of rage
Running from the thunder of a helicopter gun
The revolution will not come

Until your back aches
And the sun bakes you
And the pain breaks you
Until every minute of your life hurts
And the ripe fruit falls down into the dirt
Because your fingers and your bones and your brain are numb
The revolution will not come

Until every cop car is looking for you
For what you are, not what you do
And you stand on the earth, branded
By the wrong accent, the wrong colour skin
The wrong sexuality, the wrong mother tongue
Too fat, too thin, too old, too young
The revolution will not come

Until you walk the street, bearing unwanted seed
Condemned to breed by men who call you girl
And think they bloody own the world
Until you stare up into the hate filled face of a rapist
When you can smell his breath, taste the rancid kiss
When your stomach twists in anger and disgust
When you can feel all this as if it were done to you
– it’s not enough

Because the revolution will not come until it has made you wise
So what if you hate injustice
So what if you’re willing to die to make a change
It’s not enough to be brave, not even enough to love
Unless love leads to wisdom, when push comes to shove

So you learn to read books and faces
You study what gender and race is
You look at science and the economy
At every class and group in society
You study the past but you don’t live in it – you don’t worship it
You don’t pick through the rubble for a lost god to believe in
You read history not with a branding iron, but a blowtorch
You are not a king, you are not a priest
You are not singing in the bloody choir
You are the fire that burns through history
Your genealogy is written in the ashes of
Burnt out villages, crucified slaves
Weavers, chained to their looms
Heretics, burned at the stake
Screaming out the truth

How many thousands of years of fighting
Each other over the never-enough, one
Class after another rising to the top and
Beating back down everyone else with
Laws and religion and bullets when you don’t listen
How many thousands of years of system after system
And always the same fundamental division
You work, they rule
But you are more than just a talking tool
Let the revolution be your school
Study the connections
And you begin to see the chains of slavery
Are chains of power too
They connect you
To an army of the dispossessed
And it’s an army you will need

Because the revolution will not come until it has made you strong

Power is a good thing
Try living without it
But without a doubt it divides into two
The power to win is the power to lose
Power is nothing but the power to choose
It’s only as good as how you use it

But never forget
You are not begging for mercy
You are fighting for power

How will you break free of the ingrained habits of a lifetime
How will you gain control of your own minds
How will you bring it together to set off a chain reaction
And if you win, how will you fight off the armies that come to crush you
And if you win, how will you feed the world
And if you win, how will you carry through – how will you free the world

Be leaders who know how to be led
Be teachers who know how to be taught
Revolution is a war that has to be fought
They’ve got the guns and the weapons of mass communication
You got the power to the people that comes with organization
You got the power to the people
But you better believe they hate it
If you give’em a chance they’ll break it
You know it’s only as good as you make it
You got the power to the people
Are you ready to take it

Don’t Stay In Your Lane

Don’t
Stay in your lane
Don’t
Stay in your lane
Don’t
Stay in your lane
Don’t

Not even if you’re a cis white, male, able bodied heterosexual, middle class, young and beautiful

Don’t
Stay in your lane
Don’t

Not even if you’re too dumb to understand
Just how privileged you are
Better to speak up and get your ass kicked
Then stay stupid forever

Don’t
Stay in your lane
Don’t

Solidarity is not a “yes, darling, whatever you want“
You gotta put your head on the chopping block
Privilege is an obligation
Privilege gives you power
What are you gonna do with it
Lie back and enjoy
Or try to make a better world

True
Privilege can blind you
It can give you a voice
When the only choice you should be making
Is to shut up and listen
But sooner or later
You have come to your own decision
What are you fighting for

Don’t
Stay in your lane
Don’t

Oppression is real
It tears you up
But sometimes
Injustice and cruelty can be a kind of high octane fuel
You can become incandescent
The damage remains
Hidden in dark caves
And we can be blind in places we don’t even know exist
But we are training each other to be warriors
Our superpower is that we can see with more than
our own two eyes
I can see with your eyes
You can see with mine

Don’t
Stay in your lane
Don’t

Revolution is not
“You fight your corner, I fight mine”
We must all be on the same side
In the war against injustice
We are not parallel streams
We are one mighty river
Or we are nothing

Don’t
Stay in your lane
Don’t

The Gift Of Pain

I used to think I was weak
All my life, I thought I was weak
Because I could be hurt. In any love relationship
I was always the one who could be hurt the most
The one who was broken up, broken up with
I seemed so strong, kind, but powerful
I was loved for that – both the kindness and the power
But sooner or later, the truth would come out
The relationship would change
My lover would lose respect
This was not what she had bargained for.
I was a weakling; she was the boss

But I was wrong
Of all the wonderful things I learned from you
This was the most important, the most precious
It breaks my heart that I learned it from you
From your strength that was really a weakness
From the pieces of your broken spirit
Scattered like breadcrumbs to lead me to the truth
I am strong because I am weak, because I can be hurt
Because I can give myself without reserve
Holding nothing back, not even dignity or pride
Because I can love, no matter what the cost

If anyone else ever hears this
And feels a stab of recognition
Listen to me
You are powerful in ways
that many can only dream of
A path is open for you
You are part of a communion of lost souls
Who can find their way to a light that will shine
only for those blinded by pain
Welcome

I know this is only half the truth
The other half is my real weakness
My insecurity that must demand proof over and over again
Until the demand becomes a hammer that pounds a spike
Into the beating heart of a magic that is nothing, if not free

How I envy those who can walk away from love and
Begin again as if the whole world had not come to an end
And maybe there are those who are strong in every way
Strong in love, strong in defeat, strong enough to pick themselves up
And walk out into a new life with regret, maybe, and sadness
But with confidence and hope

I wish this for you
I wish it more
because I know it cannot be true
Some things get beaten into you
When you are too young to fight back
If I could ride in a chariot of time, wielding a sword of light
I would scatter the darkness. I would slaughter the demons
Who salted your heart with fear and emptiness
How can anything grow in such desolation
How can you find a reason to love
When you can’t find a reason to live

Oh my lost angel
If I could gather you into my arms
And hold you so tight that the broken pieces
Would fuse back into the one magical creature
Of light and grace that you were meant to be
I would give you
With all my heart
With all my love
This one precious gift
The gift of pain

Nailing The Soul Back Into The Body

One nail at a time
Or taken all altogether
The nails tell a story
The story is a lie
You are not the colour of your skin
The sex of your body
Or the calluses on your hand
You are a blossom
Rooted in the earth
Soaking up the sunlight
Of a hundred billion stars

When I was a kid
We were nailed into our bodies
There were things a man could do
That a woman never could
There were places white could go
Where black would never be allowed
And always, there was the enemy
Foreign bodies, just across the border
Across the ocean
Across the wrong side of the tracks

Vietnam
Blew my mind
The Vietnamese people were fighting off
The most powerful imperialist army
In the history of the world
My country, my army
But they were the freedom fighters
We were the invaders
Truth, Justice, and the American Way
– All my life, I had believed this lie
Now everything changed
As I looked at the world
Through Vietnamese eyes

Bring the War Home, we chanted
And the war came home
Not as a curse, but a gift
As an invitation
Join us
And we did

Revolution
Was like stepping into a different dimension
Everything was turned inside out
Two, three, many Vietnams
Asia, Africa, Latin America
Home of the Brave, Land of the Free
Bad was good
And what I had thought was good was
Monstrous
Imperialism
I had never even heard that word
– outside of a sword and toga movie
But once you start digging up bodies
You find them buried everywhere

Bring the War Home, we chanted
And now I could see
The war was already here
I could see freedom fighters on every corner
And I could see the enemy, too
We carried the enemy on our backs
Nailed into our bodies

What is the human soul but the body unleashed
The body set free
The body in all its mystery and secret
In all its possibilities
In all its interconnectedness
I am not as strong as the tiger
I cannot swim like a fish
Or fly in the air like a bird
What makes me unique
Is you
I speak your words
I sing your melodies
I dance to the music of you

Freedom is not some king on a mountaintop
Master of all he surveys, beholden to none
Freedom is you, your body
In all its frailty and power
Hopes and fears
Hunger and thirst
Freedom is you and I
Feeding each other
Food for the stomach
Courage for the heart
Ideas for the imagination

How can it be
That we slaughter each other
For an algorithm, a parasite
An invisible god that rules over the planet
With one law, one commandment, make money
More money, more money, more money
Grow or die
And all our achievements
All the wonders we have made
Are grabbed hold of and twisted
Into a machine for murder
A hammer to pound the earth
A knife to cut into our own hearts

Race, nation, gender, class
These things do not exist inside our bodies
They do not belong to us; we belong to them
It’s how we are nailed into the machine
How we become its movable parts

And of all these, gender is primal
It attacks what we are
On the deepest level of our biology
Sex is the body, the human animal
Gender is capitalism, trying to ride the tiger
Gender is the spur and the whip
And you can’t get away from it
You can’t have no gender
– anymore than you can speak without an accent
It’s a gendered world – these are the rules
And either you break’em or you don’t
But whatever you choose
You are punching in a barcode

Gender abolition – as if we could
Gender is a nail that gets pounded into each of us
Day in, day out, cradle to grave
Gender Identity
Is the scar tissue that forms around the nail
As the body tries to heal itself
But it can’t heal
Because the nail is still there
And it’s not going away
Because the problem is not just the nail
The problem is the hammer
That keeps pounding it in

Learn to love the nail
Does not work
Because if you don’t push back
It just goes in deeper
So you gotta keep on pushing back
Forever
Or else you gotta get to the hammer
And get rid of it
Not change it
Not make it nicer
Not give it a shiny new handle
Get rid of it
Unleash the body
Liberate the soul
And free the world

Ancestor Worship

There is one essential requirement for being an ancestor
You must be dead
But if you’re dead, you can’t be anything, because you’re not there
You don’t exist
Some would say, “You exist in the memories of those you left behind”
No
The memories exist, but you are gone
You’re not an actor
You’re not an agent
Any effect you could have had on the material world
Has already been set in motion

Maybe you were a big noise when you were alive
Maybe the noise you made echoes down through the centuries
In books, in stories, in video and computer games
Or maybe you were a nobody
Maybe you were forgotten almost as soon as you died
Or even before
No matter what, you are not a you anymore
You have melted into the music of the universe

The story is told that one long winter night
The shadow just outside the campfire light
Found Finn MacCool, staring into the flames
Tell me, said the shadow
What is the most beautiful music in the world?
And Finn replied
The most beautiful music in the world is the music of what happens

That’s you, what you are, what we all are
A magical wave in an endless magical ocean
And you are not limited by who was your daddy
Or your mother
Or your father’s mother’s uncle’s cousin’s brother
You are the child of every ripple in the universe
Who are your ancestors?
That’s up to you
Choose wisely

I choose Spartacus
And Mary Magdalene
And Harriet Tubman
And Sapho
And Malcolm X
And William Shakespeare
And I choose you
I know you’re not dead yet
But I choose all the ghosts bubbling up inside you
The magic of the universe
Coming out through your lips
Kissing me, breathing into me
Making me love you
I choose you
…………………………………………………

Copyright@David Lee Morgan

Faruk Ahmed Roni
Editor,
Global Poet and Poetry

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