Mike FC – Poetry forged where personal space meets public crisis.
Liverpool has a habit of producing artists who don’t just create, but bear witness. Mike FC is firmly in that lineage. His work—whether spoken, staged or sung—always feels tethered to the streets he walks and the people he listens to. With MY FRONT DOOR, his contribution to the 52 for 26 Poetry Project, Mike turns that instinctive sense of social radar onto a night that left an entire city stunned into silence.
Mike’s credentials are the sort that make you pause. A founding member of Gerundagula Productions — the radical, post-Brookside, multi-racial theatre ensemble— he’s long been an unflinching chronicler of the uncomfortable. His 2011 play Breathe In was the first to take Hillsborough onto the stage, and his monologue Meet the Real Maggie Thatcher still rumbles with the grit of a writer who refuses to dilute anything. Add to that his role in crafting JFT21’s 2024 50th anniversary anthem World at One, and you begin to see the shape of an artist who writes because silence simply isn’t an option.
But Liverpool also knows Mike as a musician, a lifer in the truest sense, and the founder of Play 2 All, the grassroots volunteer movement urging people back into the rooms where live music actually lives and breathes.
My Front Door was written on the night of the ill-fated 2025 Liverpool FC victory parade—an evening that shifted, sickeningly, from celebration to chaos just streets away from Mike’s beloved home. The poem forms part of the anthology Tales for Tim the Dentist, and it wrestles with the only question any of us had that night: Why?
This is Mike FC at his most raw, most immediate—and his most necessary.
MY FRONT DOOR
YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT US, NOT GRIND US TO THE STREET
AND IF YOU BATTLED TERRORISTS, WHY DRAG THOSE FANS LIKE MEAT? BOWLING KIDS
LIKE SKITTLES THEN TRAMPLED UNDER FEET, BLIND WITH ANGER, TORN WITH RAGE, YOUR MISSION WAS COMPLETE.
HAD BEEN SUCH A HAPPY DAY THOSE SCARVES, THAT ANFIELD ROAR
SCENE WAS VERY YELLOW NOW, RED MIST OBSCURED NO MORE,
CANS, BODIES, SHOES & CLOTHING, LITTERING THE FLOOR,
ASKED ME WAS I LOCAL? THAT HELL IS MY FRONT DOOR…
WE’LL ALWAYS ASK “HEY, WHY PICK US?” AND “WHY THAT EXACT ZONE?”
OR “HOW COULD YOU EXCUSE THIS?” OR POSSIBLY CONDONE?
QUESTIONS MAY NOT GET ANSWERED, LEFT HANGING LIKE THE PHONE,
BUT DON’T FORGET ITS LIVERPOOL, WE NEVER WALK ALONE.
