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I think all my friends are from Tir Na Nóg

For Caffy I think all my friends are from Tir na nóg the sideways people with a silver branch in their hands the ones who don’t quite fit the skin they were born in sitting on the edge of a western sea on another planet of water where the tea is brewed from the dew of the hazel of wisdom And the sugar we share is the crushed bone of a dead empire. We are looking out over to Rocklands where the grey stones are beginning to breathe and the moss is whispering secrets to the soles of our boots. They are the rulebreakers the ones who forgot how to tell the time on an iron clock The artists who paint with the sap of the rowan tree the outsiders with wings tucked under their thrift store coats. I see them, and I see the Tuatha Dé Danann drinking cold coffee and talking about the moon. they lean back Changelings left in the crib of the city there to remind the concrete how to dream carrying the health of Tír na mBeo in their marrow while the rest of the world decays in the grey light. An other...
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Digital Magdalene

 Five thousand blazers in a single quad. A sea of wool and cold entitlement. The weight of five thousand men standing on the chest of one girl. We can hear the ribs snapping under the pressure of the endowment. The alumni. The legacy. The Board of Governors. The organisation. They are not anomalies. They are the curriculum. They are the architecture. The porcelain cold of the dormitory floors where the secret is ironed into the sheets. We cannot breathe under the sheer volume of the share. They starch the collars to hide the bite marks. They use the Latin for reputation to bury the English for rape. The news calls it a guest commentary. We call it the logistics of a war zone. The Kansas City Star is just one witness in a global organisation of silence. Editorial cowardice as a form of active participation. The opinion is a bandage on a decapitation. The ink is a bribe. The paper is a shroud. CNN uncovers the hidden world. Sixty two million visits in a single month. Motherless dot c...
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If Jesus Was Real.

  If Jesus was real, he would not arrive in a halo of soft focus. He would be a postcode in a rubble-strewn district of the Levant. A wet rattle of grey dust returning from the ruin of a Gazan high-rise. An Arab man with the dirt of the occupation under his fingernails. The genealogy of the dispossessed written in the sweat on his brow. He would be the immigrant stumbling through the Kentish surf. Lungs a heavy sponge of salt and oil and death. A stateless ghost in a high-vis world that only counts the dead. What if he returned as Hind Rajab? Six years of light extinguished in the back of a black Kia. Surrounded by the cold metal of his own people’s ghosts. Screaming into a dead phone line while the tanks hummed their low mechanical hymn. The red machinery of the heart stopped by a precision strike. No angels came to the rescue. Only the dial tone and the smell of scorched upholstery. A child’s blood staining the map of a promised land. What if he was the miscarried hope in a water...
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This Isn't Normal

They voted today in the Knesset to kill Palestinian children legally,  and Ben Gvir handed out sweets, Let me say that again they handed out sweets, they handed out sweets, they handed out fucking sweets, like it was a birth, like his wife just pushed out something worth celebrating, passed candy hand to hand, sugar dissolving on tongues while the law passed, making murder clean, making murder parliamentary, making murder something you can taste,  But this isn't new, this is the echo, this is the rope still swinging. 1930, Mandatory Palestine,  Fuad Hijazi, Ata al-Zeer, Mohammad Jamjoum, hanged in Acre prison by the British, their necks snapping, clean, legal, parliamentary.  The British measured the drop, calculated the weight, made sure the neck would break, not strangle, efficient, humane,  that's what they called it, humane hanging. for resisting occupation.  Then they hung more than 100 Palestinians,  kept the rope warm,  kept the gallows bus...
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Socialism or Pervertism

 The island is a suppurating pelvic floor. A hip bone rising from the grey silt of the Atlantic, pinned under the weight of a fifty-storey phallus of glass and steel, an engorged monument to the theft of breath and the industrialisation of the womb. This is the medical report of the siege. The light is a brownout. The light is a flicker. The light is the dying pulse of a patient on the table. It is the smell of sweat, diesel, and the sharp metallic tang of a speculum in a cold room. The blockade is a catheter of rusted iron, draining the vitality of the state into the gutters of the north. Donald Trump is the rapist in the room. He is a creature of cold fat and expensive grease; His pores leak black industrial oil onto the pale linen of the bedsheets. He does not look at the face. He looks at the soil as if it were a slit in a dress. He looks at the child as if she were a map to be folded and tucked into a pocket of debt. He’s a man who knows a little about small islands. He knows ...
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Hollow Crotch and Painted Knickers

They gave the boys the soldier with the eagle eye And the hollow crotch The Action Man with the scar on his cheek and the kung-fu grip A plastic preview of the violence they would later call protection. We were the static brides in the cardboard boxes The ones with the painted-on knickers And the legs that never bent. They taught us the shape of our servitude Before we could even spell the word. A dress rehearsal for the pleasure of the architects Who carved us into the little men and little women they needed To fill the kitchens of the houses they built for us. They defined us by the weight of the air between our thighs A cacophony of silence where the map was blank But the borders were strictly enforced. We grew up in a house of euphemisms Where the body was a series of rooms, we were forbidden to enter. They taught us to be defined by our genitals Whilst never giving us the language to name them. But in the shadows of the toy chest, we were already playing rebellion. Every girl grin...
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COMPOST HEAP OF DESIRE

  The sun is a jaundiced Eve bulging over the city a yellow cyst ripening in a sky the colour of a bruised lung The developers are pouring liquid lead into the throat of the soil asphyxiating the earth until the worms turn to grey ash They are harvesting the shade and bottling our panic for the shareholders The concrete is a calcified tumour growing over the common while you sit across from me in your bias cut spite My mirror leech My shadow twin with the structural tailoring and the serrated smile You look at me like a sample sale you can’t quite afford to mock Every word you speak is a fine needle under my fingernails Your envy is a starving animal snapping at the light Bewildered by the way you want to harvest the salt from my scars just to season the flat taste of your own boredom You want to wear my breath like a vintage brooch I am a toxic acre you can't gentrify with a grin You want to wear my face like a filter and my voice like a trend Your solidarity is a starched collar ...
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