The Sound Of Bo Belle

The Fallen Angel, Cabenel, 1847   In the soil where we plant our damaged gods thorns draw blood from what remains tender I press my mouth to wounds left by saints who failed their own congregation   Those who grasped laughter's meaning how it fractures through stone walls and multiplies in smaller voices long past the hunger's last breath long past your moral auditors who dissect a legacy for flaws What's love stripped of absolution? What's struggle without dirt under fingernails? My chest cracks in the hollow between who they actually were and the myths we carved out from their bones When uprisings are never baptised clean enough When champions are never scrubbed pure enough Your martyrs always fail suburban conscience examination Whilst you calculate their worthiness the machine devours our young like sacrament Their mouths learnt poison as mother tongue That whispered to them a green liberation whilst empire's ash still coated their throats They knew vodka's ...

Image: TMZ Cathedral light stages choreographed romance, Taylor Swift's perfect proposal performance whilst BBC headlines wedding speculation Gaza burns in its margins.   Breakfast telly dissects her ring finger as children's hands grasp Rafah stones. Red tops hunger for venue predictions, camps transform to burial grounds.   Her silence drowns like church bells, muffling cries from hospitals without medicine.   Media machinery devours fairy tale fiction, front pages bloom with engagement dreams whilst genocide hides on page seventeen tucked between crosswords and weather forecasts.   She champions her own glass ceiling whilst ignoring concrete crushing women worldwide. Speaks of empowerment in penthouse interviews whilst empowered women get buried alive.   She is architect of mass distraction, not princess but engineer of diversion.   Her white feminism fortress stands tall, flirting with supremacist shadows whilst Palestinian women give birth in rubble, w...

They crawled out the woodwork when little Hind died, six years old, bleeding in that car for hours while they typed "but Hamas" under every post, their fingers getting sticky with digital blood. One post about the flour massacre and here come all the bots with their blue and white flags, screaming about human shields while Israeli snipers pick off kids queuing for bread in Rafah. They turned up at the London march too, these Zionist counter-protesters with their "Hamas is ISIS" placards, drowning out Palestinian mothers whose sons are rotting under rubble. Same energy as the EDL really, different uniform, but the same hate. They heckled the students at Cambridge, called them terrorists for camping while Gaza universities burn to ash. Remember when they doxxed a teacher for showing solidarity with Jenin? Got her sacked for saying occupation is wrong while settlers dance on Palestinian graves and TikTok it for the algorithm. They spam every thread about Shireen Abu Ak...

She was Ireland itself  screaming through a woman’s throat, Her voice the keening of a thousand graves, They sectioned truth and called it anecdote While counting coins from children sold as slaves. That photograph torn—not paper, but the veil That hid their bloody altars from our sight, Each rip a victim’s starving wail, Each fragment burning in fluorescent light. Her skull shaved bare like hills  stripped of their trees, By Empire’s axe and Rome’s unholy hand, She bore the scars of centuries on her knees A living map of a colonised wasteland. They pumped her full of chemicals and lies, The same poisons that pacified our soil, Whilst Tuam’s babies rotted beneath night skies And we genuflected to her nation’s spoils. MAD? Yes—like any victim telling truth About the boot that crushes on their neck, They stole her children, murdered Ireland’s youth, Then called her crazy when she named the wreck. She was no songbird she was a banshee keen, Prophesying death that already came, Fo...

Ballymena riots - hyphenonline.com They stick their flags on lampposts like territorial dogs marking street corners, screaming silence into microphones that carry their howls across broken Britain "We're being oppressed!" they cry, drowning out everything else with their orchestrated noise. White British racists who swear they're not racist wave the butcher's apron like bloody bandages, a Union Flag stained with centuries of colonial slaughter, claiming victimhood while throwing bricks through refugee hotel windows stones cast by those living in glass houses built on stolen land. Meanwhile musicians stand in court for picking up a Hezbollah flag not waving it as a sword, just touching it like forbidden fruit. Then we get arrested for supporting Palestine, for not being racist, for standing with the oppressed instead of dancing with the oppressors at their blood-soaked ball. Violence at refugee hotels broken windows like shattered dreams, terrified families huddled...

Come close, beloved,  hear the sound of boots on pavement, batons raised high, selective justice in the morning light They march past hotels where families huddle, fear in their eyes like broken glass, far right fists pumping poison into air while police badges turn blind, while state uniforms look the other way, claiming “public order” when the order serves their masters But raise your voice for Gaza children, hold a sign that says “stop the killing” and suddenly SUDDENLY!! the law remembers how to move, handcuffs click like typewriter keys spelling out your arrest warrant in the language of hypocrisy Dance with me through this maze of madness, Oh, my love, where protesters become “extremists” for holding up mirrors to power’s ugly face They’ll call us radicals for refusing to forget, troublemakers for asking why children’s screams don’t echo in parliament halls, agitators for demanding the same humanity they reserve for themselves Sweet contradiction of our times the peace-makers...

A poem to make sense of my confessional blog post found here:  https://thesoundofbobelle.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-dad-was-sweet-tender-hooligan.html , Here in the mirror’s crack of memory, I excavate the archaeology of fatherhood each bone a contradiction, each shard a swastika wrapped in bedtime stories. Daddy was a sweet and tender hooligan, singing Screwdriver lullabies, teaching me to salute the wrong gods while tucking me in with calloused hands that threw bricks at Pakistani families but never at me. The rabbit hutch childhood blooms like barbed wire, Birmingham Catholic ghosts haunting adoption papers burned like book pyres, like synagogues, like bridges between who we were and who we pretended to be. I am the daughter of a failed fascist, Roma blood wrestling Aryan mythology in the petri dish of my DNA a beautiful stalemate, a genetic ceasefire where olive skin conquered blue eyes but his jawline claimed the throne. Upton Park stadiums echo with our last conversation, footba...

In the cathedral of manufactured quiet  where Taylor Swift counts streaming revenue  as Palestinian children count final breaths  her voice carries across stadiums but never holds the weight of genocide When the tide turns, when sales drop, when focus groups demand it, she will speak then, only then, when silence costs more than speaking Taylor Swift ain't no prophet in this arena, Taylor Swift is just merchant in the temple of lies Now Beyoncé, empress of selective outrage,  her posed formation means nothing  when formations of tanks roll through refugee camps,  her crown heavy with diamonds mined from silence about mass graves But when market research shows, when demographics shift, when staying quiet kills the brand,  they will find their voice then— conveniently, righteously then Beyoncé ain't no goddess in this church, Beyoncé is the calculating priestess of profit The Kardashians, architects of emptiness,  building empires from manufactured ...

                                                                                                                      Charlie Cliff illustration. (C)  Somewhere between the black woods and eternity  a radio telescopes inward,  receiving transmissions from planets that orbit too close to dying stars Wire-frame glasses reflect fluorescent autopsy light  while he dissects the anatomy of manufactured dreams and finds the tumour growing in capitalism's left ventricle His stretched skin becomes holy parchment An ancient text written in braille for blind gods  who never learned to read suffering in its native tongue The ...

They taught the map to hunger  folding oceans into pockets, stitching borders like bruises on skin. England is a monster in a waistcoat, a polite horror setting the kettle, fingers working the noose behind the lace. She smiles with teeth of empire, presses civility over open wounds, calls theft "civilisation" and names it kindly. They watched the Black and Tans arrive like thunder, boots full of winter, laughter cut like knives, khaki ghosts with the scent of burned thatch. They tramped hedgerows into testimony, dragged dawn through gable-doors, turned hearths into evidence, left children’s songs in ash. They made a sport of small lights: a boy’s bicycle, a woman’s shawl, the hymn a priest had taught the church. They beat the old roads into scars, stitched fear into the seams of villages, burned names into smoke so families could not read them. But read the file on James Connolly  a heart already punctured by the fight, tied to a chair like a dying animal trapped; they shot t...

We kept the light on for him a single bulb trembling like a borrowed breath, watching the jawline, the dog‑eared gesture of a hand. When the feed thinned and the frame went black, a witness was taken, a story broken. They called him a terrorist afterwards stamped accusation where proof should be; a name criminalised to justify the silence. Say Anas first when you wake; let his name be the light you carry. Anas, the small account we failed to balance; his hands the stubborn proof someone was watching. 242 — speak it slow, an index of absence. 242 mouths folded into dust, into ledger lines, into timestamps on stone. Mathematics of erasure: losses logged neat as contracts, cold as a Murdoch headline. He kept talking into white noise, into the last pixel of daylight; his voice a witness hammered into frame — a prayer with no dial tone. The feed folded into earth; the camera blinked and died. We count him with breaths we cannot spare. Anas: a name lodged in the chest, an imprint that will n...