The Sound Of Bo Belle

Iman Poorfarokh © Love, we were taught, comes in one colour: white dress, white lies, white picket certainty. But I have learned it bleeds in shades bruise-purple of almost, scar-pink of too late, the sick yellow of timing that mocks us with its cruelty. I am washing dishes when your message arrives my hands in grey water, grease floating like small continents And I have to grip the counter because your words three lines, nothing profound undo me in ways I didn't know I could come apart. You've misspelt "definitely" again, that specific failure of autocorrect you never fix, and you always sign off with "x" even in serious messages, that small intimacy you give to everyone and it's this, these stupid details, that makes me want to burn my life down. The tea towel in my hand still smells of last night's dinner, ordinary things, the architecture of a life I built because I was too afraid to build anything else, and on my phone: another notification, ano...

The scarlet stain, they ram it on us, a badge, a violated prayer, across the chest, a scar they brand. But whose fallen? I snarl. Whose? Not the children of Palestine, not those pulverised beneath the boot of empire, power’s cold, unyielding embrace. They gasp, "never again," a hollow echo, a festering lie, as genocides gorge themselves, sickening, under a blood-soaked sky. And the galling farce of it, So soon after Soldier F walks free, justice butchered, a cold, unfeeling report. The royals, pomp and circumstance, a gilded cage of grief, their diamond tears, cold, their sorrow, brief, a performance for the cameras. While land chokes on the rot of shattered bodies, from Derry to the Dnieper, they lay their wreaths like blindfolds, and the true cost, it just keeps gaping, a wound that will not close, a putrid scar. This poppy, stained, once a field of Flanders' sorrow, a torn flag in the mud, blood-soaked earth, now a corporate brand, shoved down our throats for tomorrow....

Listverse© The air, it's not dust,  It's the pulverised bones of every promise they ever choked on, a fine, grey ash, gritty, like ground-down teeth,  coating the back of our throats, dulling our thoughts. We breathe their lies, a caustic fume, acrid on the tongue,  a poison gas burning our throats raw,  scarring our collective lungs to leather. Truth, a whisper lost in the digital static,  the endless scrolling, a memory dissolving,  like smoke from a burning flag,  into a disinterested, apathetic sky, cold and unblinking, like a surveillance camera. Gaza, a ripped-out heart, still beating, somehow, a phantom ache in this world's numb, gold-plated ribcage. Sudan, a slow, red seep, the desert floor drinking it down, insatiable. The earth itself weeping, a silent, crimson river, unseen, unheard, by those whose ledgers swell in the silence. Congo's ancient agony, a primal scream torn from the earth's core, born again and again, a fresh harvest of sufferi...

The city's gut-punch,  every breath a stolen thing,  a shallow gasp against the concrete press.  Mornings, flat-grey, a metallic tang on the tongue,  like a dead TV screen,  no signal, no sound,  just the hum of my own unravelling,  a low-grade fever in the bones.  Sirens, a banshee shriek,  ripping through the thin fabric of what I thought I was.  Lost.  A piece of flotsam in the gutter's slick,  no compass, no goddamn direction,  just the low thrum of the ache, always the ache.  The world, a smeared watercolour,  a phantom limb throbbing in the void,  the stench of exhaust and rotting hope,  a suffocating, meaningless blur,  where even shadows cast no truth. Then.  A crack in the concrete.  From the bitter earth, they rise.  The giants.  A primal, green religion, a silent, defiant refusal.  Their roots, deep-fisted,  clutching something true, something ancient, ...

The walls of Derry, they don't just whisper, they scream.  A guttural howl from Rossville Flats,  where the crimson gouged the tarmac,  a stain no verdict can wash clean.  To walk those streets,  feel the cold breath of ghosts clinging to every brick,  See the museum's silent, screaming evidence:  the gored cloth, a child's last breath,  The lead shrapnel torn from young flesh.  And the priest, murdered mid-prayer,  His cassock soaked, a sacred sacrifice.  Those rubber rounds, fat as a coloniser's thumb,  the bludgeon of Britain's 'law' ,  designed to brutalise,  to break the spirit,  not to save a soul. This suffering, a jagged seam of pain through the Troubles,  a direct consequence of Britain's imperial hand,  from the blanket men's defiance,  to the hunger strikers' dying breaths,  Each sacrifice, a link in their chain.  The scars are not just on these walls,  but etched into t...

Hind Rajab, five years old, who liked to draw flowers, who was learning to read, who spent three hours on the phone begging someone to come, who died alone in the heat surrounded by her family's bodies, who waited twelve days to be found— This is where we begin. Not with policy. Not with geopolitics. With a child's voice saying "Come and get me" into a phone slippery with her cousin's blood. Major Sean Glass wakes in a settlement His grandmother never saw. Glass. You can see through him the hollow where a heart should beat, the transparent skull where three hundred and fifty-five bullets ricochet eternally. Commander of the Vampire Empire Company. They named themselves. Chose the monster. Became it. Trained at Britain's Defence Academy, Shrivenham, where they teach you how to say neutralise instead of murder, where they teach you the paperwork that turns a six-year-old into a ' hostile target' . 29 January 2024. Tel al-Hawa. The Hamadeh family flees. G...