The Sound Of Bo Belle

 Cobh, July 29th. I sit in your shadow at the harbour’s edge  Where the Atlantic breathes promises in sea salt on Cohb’s old stones  I sit, notebook in hand, rested on aching knees Watching the blue/grey pour itself over water  Like whisky in God’s own cut glass And you? - You’re back in Cork now, or London, maybe Toronto  - wherever the wind carried your big heart After we learned that love cannot be split down the middle  We are like driftwood, splintered but kind  Still so beautiful, but no longer whole. I hear children now, and in your voice I think: “Christ! Jaysus! The mouths on them!” Their shrieks of “crackhead!”, “Feck!” “Bollocks!” at disinterested seagulls  As their mothers gather laundry from lines distant Strung out between crumbling council houses like prayer flags  In a country scarred in green and catholic guilt  The workmen pack up now, their barrels of sand lay waiting in the cobblestone  Their tools downed and lef...

Written in Cork, July 2026. I don’t want to look at my phone anymore I've seen a thousand ways to destroy a child. Every notification is a small apocalypse Each share a buried shroud Hi definition unfolding a 4k horror ENDLESS ENDLESS ENDLESS Suffering. My eyes hover over the screen An oval hummingbird afraid to land Knowing already that death waits beneath the glass Where mothers are clutching to dust and fathers carrying pieces of dreams Dreams that were once whole. This should not be possible in a world that smugly claims to know better but here we are - Witnessing genocide though instagram stories and thousands of TikTok testimony Online - the modern town square of collective sighing Scrolling mindlessly past advertisements of soap and shoes Sandwiched between body counts and falling rubble A capitalist obscene dance with catastrophe. The way that profit margins never pause for mass graves My phone buzzes another notification from the future Telling us that we are living throug...

Some thoughts, in a Ginsberg delusion on the martyrdom of Bobby Sands. He of concrete grey against pale skin And the long corridor of time stretching  beyond hunger's reach —a man he, dissolving into myth before their eyes while Margaret’s England turned away from the slow death of moral conscience Where the raw edge of resistance burns through scratch blankets & prison walls as history's fingers trace the outline of a wasted body becoming symbol becoming storm, becoming… the voice they cannot silence and Bobby Sands is a hero in this house Here - where the forgotten raise their fists Bobby Sands is a hero in this house Here - where resistance still exists And Somewhere between the smash of batons & the rhythm beat of rain against boarded long kesh windows a revolution breathes— on paper smuggled between sweating palms, words that outrun the empire's rabid dogs and I, gypsy, know this road this an ancient displacement,  how they name you criminal for daring to exist...