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Blood Against Roses

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 burn and visions
before mastering hunger's vocabulary

Journals that haemorrhage smudged ink
But words sharp enough to sever arteries
but after... sweet hell... after their voices carried
through forests white with winter's rage
counties drowning in Atlantic grief
valleys where children's joy rings free
from the shackles they shattered

Hearts built like abandoned houses
some rooms sealed with a winter's malice
others flung wide for spring's invasion
walls painted emerald with yearning
crimson with revolution's fever touch

Watch the metamorphosis of moths bleeding through cocoons
those who preached division expiring for unity's kiss
those who erected barriers now demolishing them
with the same scarred hands

I ache watching your moralised apathy
your ideological virginity tests
your retrospective sanctimony
that would have exiled every single fractured saint
whoever bled dry for liberation

Revolution is the wheel's violent turn
Transformation is always a bloody birth
but you demand angels delivered perfect
never requiring resurrection

They starved for freedom... whilst sneering at death
dreamt emancipation... whilst signing execution orders
They detonated London's arteries then cultivated hope
in Belfast's wounded earth
in conquered Winter Palaces
then built their own arctic in countless frozen souls

The weight of it crushes and purity strangles progress
Whilst perfection assassinates change
Whilst you await immaculate saviours
the world incinerates

We're lovers in this necropolis
waltzing on compromised gods' remains
saltwater nourishing soil where paradoxes flourish
like dandelions through concrete's grip

In struggle's shadow theatre 

we perform our limping choreography

stumbling over predecessors' corpses 

collapsing into each other's embrace

knowing purity is a privilege reserved for the uncommitted

Your insurgent pulses and hammers against my ribs
both marked with accommodation's stain
both haunted by Bloody Sunday phantoms

Black January's spectres grieving saints we'll never become
whilst cherishing the flawed humans we are
We make love atop manifestos authored by men who'd horrify us
If sitting across our modern dinner tables
Yet they perished for visions we still chase

Green, white, gold or crimson stars ascending
identical salt crystallised in palm lines
identical thorns embedded in fingerprints
identical thirst that empties rivers
broken masons laying foundations in ruins that still breathe

Night shows our beautiful contradiction
wanting everything perfect whilst drowning in human mess
needing heroes but knowing they're broken people
who just wouldn't give up

They grasped what every authentic fighter learns
children's laughter outweighs any saint's unmarked record

The hunger striker's ghost murmurs to the commissar's shade:
"Did any of it matter?"
"Ask the children who'll never taste chains"

We absolve our champions... their purges, their car bombs
their uncomfortable racism, their brutality, their catastrophically human hearts
We absolve ourselves for requiring them despite our superior knowledge

Flawless revolution remains mythology
The Perfect revolutionary is a pure fiction
Whilst you await angels... fascism advances
ordnance detonates and innocence weeps

And yet still...
ascending on crooked spines
battling with damaged weapons, pursuing impossible visions
Revolution isn't perfection... revolution is trajectory
Every compromised deity aimed towards something finer
stumbling, crashing, bleeding, across your spotless doctrine

Love isn't purity... love is a metamorphosis
Revolution is simply love with its sleeves pushed up
prepared for the exquisite chaos of remaking everything
Even when the world resists transformation
Even when heroes refuse sainthood
Even when saints refuse perfection

I cherish them regardless and cherish them endlessly
Cherish them into mythology and mythology into reality
A reality into tomorrow
where damaged hands construct something luminous

Children's laughter resonates longer than the silence of saints
Saints too pristine to bleed

The fight needs warriors not martyrs
Combatants and not theorists...
Souls willing to err en route to righteousness
Gather purity and inter it with expired gods
who rescued no one

When revolution approaches
It's messy and breathing
It's flawed and fierce
It's radiant and ruined
exactly like us.

 

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