Mandy Laird-Hall: a retrospective (part 2)

In the second part of this Mandy Laird-Hall retrospective, three more of the poems Mandy performed at our Dead Good Poets' open mic nights in the years before Covid. The first two were written for a couple of our themed nights. I have to say that 'Asylum 1865', which concludes the blog, blew me away when I heard it first and has just done so again as I put this post together. Enjoy them all and please feel free to comment and share. 

Don’t Find It

Never land, never land, never land in Neverland

Fiendish Pan clad in skeleton leaves
With juices that ooze out of trees
He takes your trust and lures you in
A promised land that seeps with sin.

Nefarious fairies cast their spell
Led by the teratoid Tinkerbell
Believing their ploys, their jealous lies
They’ll trample you down, ignore your cries.

Be wary of that vicious croc
Who’ll crunch your bones, despite the clock
And leave you broken, bitten, spat
Discarded, dismal, wrung out flat

No escaping heinous Hook
Who rips your heart out like a crook
Then chews it raw, washed down with wine,
Dribbling shivers down your spine

Tootles, Curly, Nibs and Slightly
Will take your dreams and twist them tightly,
Aspirations squeezed to dust
Love transposed to lightless lust.

Take the 2nd star to the right and carry on till morning
No health warning!

Vegetables and Rhythm

Beet needs the heat to grow succulent and sweet –
Makes the bulbous bulb grow larger and the flavour more complete.
The old wives’ tale says beet heats your toes,
Widens out your blood vessels and sends heat to your nose –
But scientists have proven that this is very silly
Concentrated beet juice makes you no less chilly –
Betalains in beets cause red poop and pee
In 9% of cases – so not quite majority –
So let’s sit in the garden with our vegetable juice
With our drums and our guitars,
Playing free and hanging loose
Drinking beet in the heat to the beat in the heat –
Drinking beet in the heat to the beat in the heat.


Asylum 1865

My name it is Elizabeth; they call me barmy Bette.
Been here three year, engulfed in fear, and no release date set.
And why, you ask, is this my home, with no sign of release?
I questioned my dear husband re his sleeping with my niece.

This place is full of women who have challenged gender norms,
Spoke up and pushed oppression back, in all its sexist forms
Some would not promise to obey or walk through life half-blind.
They didn’t toe the family line; some dared to speak their mind

Our warped ideas, we’re female ‘queers’, with shrunken hearts and brain
Lock them away, the judges say, save us from the insane.
Save them, poor mites, the social blights, they know not what they do-
Moral contagion, gross mutations, we’ll help them muddle through –

Deviant women, here to be cured, neglected wifely duty
We’re problematic spouses, sisters, daughters lacking beauty.
We are gender deviant, unwomanly and mannish,
Immoral and hysterical, they’d love us all to vanish

So cauterize our cervix and compress our ovaries
Chain us to the wooden beds, complete lobotomies
Give enemas and borax to eliminate our badness
We’re nymphomaniacs, fallen whores, born with raving madness

Our families saved from social scars by this fair institution
Our souls to save as our minds rave, this neat and kind solution
My name it is Elizabeth, some call me barmy Bette
My children lost their mother – the world pronounced me dead.

Thanks to Mandy's son Oliver for permission to reproduce his mother's poems.