Paul Pike finds the everyday magic in the lost objects and the poetry of Merseyside streets.
In the swirl of everyday London—or Merseyside, or perhaps somewhere between wherever poetry lives—Paul Pyke finds wonder. His submitted poem Dance Battle came to life not from grand inspiration, but from something as small and concrete as an abandoned bangle beside a pigeon flock. That quiet moment, waiting for trains and sausage rolls, sparked a poem about collision, imagination, and possibility.
As Pyke tells it, he was chatting with a friend about how inspiration can come from the tiniest things. There, abandoned on the pavement by a pastry‑flinging pigeon, lay a bracelet. Who had lost it? What stories had it carried? What future might it know? That small object lodged itself in his notes app, and months later, Dance Battle was born.
The poem, true to its title, taps into something playful, but deeply human. In Pyke’s mind, that little bangle becomes a protagonist in its own right: a relic of someone’s past, a spark for someone else’s imagination. It’s also a metaphor for connection—how lost things and lost people intersect, how we pick up fragments of each other’s lives, even in moments of stillness.
Pyke’s voice is gravelly, warm, funny, and profound—qualities honed by years performing on open-mic nights across Merseyside and the UK. He is a fixture at Liverbards (Ma Boyle’s), Word Vomit (Round the Corner), Blast (The Excelsior), The Dreaming (Bookbinder), and on festival stages at Liverpool Sound City, Cheltenham Literature Festival, Smithdown Road, and beyond.
His work has appeared in LaVida Liverpool and the anthology Give Poetry a Chance II, building a reputation for writing that’s both grounded and visionary: streetwise, accessible, but capable of surprising leaps.
In Dance Battle, Pyke distils his craft into a moment of stillness, then sets it dancing. He shows us how a tiny lost object can reflect big questions: Who are we? What do we carry with us? What stories float, forgotten, around our ordinary lives?
This poem is not a performance piece, though it would shine in one — it’s an intimate meditation, a quiet celebration of what slips through the cracks, what we abandon and what we claim, and how even the smallest things can carry the weight of a universe.
If you catch Pyke at an open mic, you might hear Dance Battle read aloud—and suddenly, that discarded bracelet feels like the centre of everything.
Dance Battle
The older you get
the more you smell
The soil
that’s waiting to claim your physical form.
You must mourn all those things
you could have been
to accept what you have become.
You’ve had great difficulty
Riding a horse called Wild Commotion – when your head was lost,
Heart, broken,
Hands, idle.
Seek to govern that horse
With a tug on its bridle.
Find focus,
love,
Work that is meaningful.
Like a baby seagull
Finding its wings for the first time,
You could plummet to your death at any time,
But if you don’t try to fly,
What would be the point in trying to survive?
Like an abandoned bangle
on platform two
of Stoke-on-Trent train station,
You can shine like a beacon
– to someone needing a bangle
to complete their funky outfit
As they wait for the train to Crewe,
then onwards to Liverpool,
Where they plan to dance with you
and your shadow.
One day you’ll be a story.
Lines of text in a dusty book
Waiting for that someone
To pick you up,
To read life back into your character.
Rise from your slumber,
dance with your reader.
They will dance-battle with your shadow
through twilight,
When shadow is at its longest
And seems to engulf the world in darkness.
They will dance through morning sunrise,
Your cheeks wet with tears
As they help you work through your fears
And those years of pain.
The heat from the exertion
and from the sun
Will evaporate those tears into rainclouds,
As they teach you
that rainbows were hidden in those shadows,
waiting for the sunshine
to kiss the rain
this whole time.
You dance-battled with your reader until noon,
Then you danced some more
And made love on their bedroom floor.
You must be knackered.
Take a rest,
have a giggle at some of those shapes
You threw down on the dance floor
With reckless abandon.
Let those good feelings linger
like petrichor.
When you’ve got the energy,
Dance again with your bangle-clad reader
And with all the stars in the sky,
– for this is what you’ve been waiting for.
