The Sound Of Bo Belle

They kidnapped Maduro on a Tuesday. Not arrested. Kidnapped. Hands on flesh, body moved against its will, the physical fact of being grabbed, of sovereignty ending where fingers grip arm, where a man becomes cargo, where the border of your skin means nothing when empire decides otherwise. Snatched like a purse, like prey, like your body is just matter to be relocated, like the state can reach across lines on a map and take you, move you, cage you, because power is always, finally, about bodies— who gets to move them, who gets to stop them, whose flesh is sacred, whose is just meat to be processed. Call it what it is: piracy with paperwork, the same hands that throttled Allende, that drowned Lumumba in his own blood, that wrote “regime change” in the margins of every country that dared to keep its own oil. The news says “detained” and I want to vomit. The news has always been a clean word for a dirty thing, a pressed shirt over a broken rib cage, and we swallow it, we let it slide down ...

Every man adores a fascist, the man with the iron fist and the microphone And here he is again, the man who bought girls from Epstein, like property, who raped and walked free, who killed with policy and never saw a courtroom that could hold him. Building his wall brick by brick by executive order, and the mothers come, children clutched like prayers, to the edge, always the edge, where America ends And mercy never began. I watch them on my phone, thumb scrolling, complicit as any gadji who's learned to look away when the state decides which bodies matter, which children get to live. The mothers are so small on my screen, their children perfected in that American way which is to say, dead enough to be pitied, not alive enough to be let in. One was named Jakelin. She was seven. She died of dehydration in a cell while guards laughed about her vomit. I scrolled past her. I had dinner. I forgot her name until I needed it for this poem. The man who partied with Epstein, who said his dau...

The rot grows again. A fresh scab torn, a gut-scream ripped, from '81's concrete walls. Not history, but a bloody gash, weeping pus and memory, the same old cruelties, new slick skin. Bone-ache, the slow, organ-devouring fade, the breath growing sour, a taste of rust and dying cells upon the tongue, a metallic tang of internal rot. Now, cells hold new ghosts, bodies unraveling, a desperate banner, brittle as old parchment, clinging to bone.  Water only, slow suicide against the state's granite gullet. Each day, flesh consumes itself, a silent scream, muscle wasting to string, tendons taut, visible beneath paper-thin skin. The stomach is a burning void, a caustic acid devouring its own lining, the tongue is a dry, cracking rasp, a desert in the mouth. Eyes, sunken hollows, watch the inner dark, the world blurring, a fevered haze. Lammy's silence, a polished tombstone, void's black mirror. He declines to meet; fifty-one pleas ignored. Starmer's slick tongue, tasti...

Peabody Essex Museum  © London hits forty, and the pavement goes soft not metaphor, actual tar melting under my feet, the city sweating through its skin, And I can't breathe. Not metaphor. Actual lungs full of California wildfire, Siberian methane, Amazon ash. Every breath costs more than I can pay. Bezos flies to space on the backs of workers pissing in bottles because bathroom breaks cut profit margins. Musk tweets about Mars while his lithium mines poison water tables, while Pakistan drowns. Gates buys 280,000 acres while farmers lose everything, while he lectures us about sustainability from his climate-controlled compound. They know. They've always known. They're building bunkers in New Zealand and calculating which of us are worth saving. The answer is none of us. Last summer, someone died on the Tube. Heat exhaustion. Northern Line. Collapsed between stations, organs shutting down one by one, died on their way to work because rent was due and they don't care if y...

René Magritte  The Lovers (Les Amants) , 1928 I love you in the language they tried to bury mo ghrá, miro kamipe syllables that taste like dirt and defiance, the kind you swallow when the bailiffs come, When your mother won't look at you, when you're too tired to be brave. I don't remember when I first saw you maybe at the thing in South Bank, maybe before, Maybe we've been circling each other in all the rooms where people like us end up: the ones with bad lighting and good anger, where someone's always collecting for bail funds and the tea tastes like solidarity and dust, where we're all pretending we're not as scared as we are. I love you means: I see the occupation in your eyes. It means your grandmother's hands, and mine, could've been in the same mass grave if the century had turned differently. Gaza burns, and I can't stop crying. Kabul starves, and you go silent for three days. The Calais camps are bulldozed again and we hold each other li...

They are doing it again. Not in history. In cells two hours from here. People whose names you don't know are in the days when their kidneys are drowning in their own toxins. Their bodies are eating their hearts not metaphor: medical fact, cardiac muscle broken down for fuel, myocardium torn apart cell by cell, bodies cannibalising themselves to keep brains alive One more hour. You are reading this. Your eyes are moving across a screen. They are dying. Right now. While you blink. 1981: Thatcher ate breakfast while Bobby Sands' organs failed. Bacon. Toast. Marmalade. She slept fine, the papers said. Probably fucked her husband after. Came home from Parliament and had a bath while a man's heart ate itself two hundred miles away. 2025: Starmer eats dinner while Filton's hunger strikers count down to nothing. Different party. Same appetite for ghosts. Same ability to sleep. Same capacity to look in the mirror and see a human being instead of what he is: a man who could stop ...