Cordite over Cornflakes

UN confirms genocide this morning...
we've known for months,

screaming into Westminster's deaf stone ears

while Israel writes epitaphs in rubble and bone-dust

across Gaza's broken spine,

and my friend texts from the coast.

"Family to the water, I stay behind.

We will die; Palestine will live"

words hanging like cordite smoke over Cornflakes,

bitter as the BBC's measured dance around genocide,

and my friend texts from the coast.

Tommy Robinson's march draws ten thousand for "Britain First"

while Rafah's children burn in hospital beds,

these flag-wavers blind to the truth

that free Palestine means fewer desperate boats crossing dark waters,

and my friend texts from the coast.

The global flotilla cuts Mediterranean swells

toward Gaza's blockaded shore,

Greta's young face branded "terrorist" by those

who rain white phosphorus on refugee camps,

Israel mocking witness as vanity,

and my friend texts from the coast.

Time moves like treacle through our safe rooms

while bombs fall faster than aid ships sail,

faster than conscience stirs in Downing Street's carpeted corridors

where they sign arms deals with steady hands,

and my friend texts from the coast.

We scroll through horror with our morning tea,

signing petitions like prayers to gods gone deaf,

our hashtags making mockery of the dying

while somewhere in Gaza's rubble

he tends the wounded,

and my friend texts from the coast.

The shore, last refuge where families huddle

between sea and slaughter,

the flotilla sailing through indifferent waters

carrying hope like contraband toward a destination that may vanish,

and my friend texts from the coast.

"We will die; Palestine will live"

words that crack hearts wide,

that expose our safe distance as genocide

unfolds documented and unstoppable as Mediterranean tide,

and my friend texts from the coast.

Comments

Glass

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...

My Dad Was A Sweet & Tender Hooligan...

Dad (Right), with Derek Beackon campaigning on the Isle of Dogs, 1993. ... A Failed Fascist & Father. There is so much confusion around exactly who I am. A Romani woman who was a child of a Neo-Nazi father. A Neo-Nazi father who, despite all my philosophical protestations otherwise, probably has been the most impactful influence on me. An anti-racist activist whose voice shakes in the guilty shadow of childhood memories of pride performing adult encouraged Sieg Heil salute. Yet, I owe a debt to my father. I am who I am, whatever that is, because he was who he was. Not that I think he knew who he was either. Adopted by a Birmingham Catholic family and no traceable adoption records must have have him an existential void that he tried to fill with fascism. Finding a family in West Ham football hooligan gangs, singing his rage out to Screwdriver, finding a uniform to wear in the worse sides of the Skinhead movement. The only stories I heard about this childhood was a ...

Verdict in Viscera

The nation is a white room with no corners. It smells of bleach. It smells of the sharp, metallic tang of the law. The state is not at the keyhole: it is the cold, clinical light that refuses to flicker. It is the sudden chill of the sheet against my spine. The hard, unyielding edges of the iron frame. Your mouth is a trespass on a map they have not yet digitised. A secret union of the rain-heavy moss of the island and the iron-red dust of the road. Two stolen territories finding a common border in the dark. I want to drown the sirens in the heavy, industrial heat of your throat. To feel the interior labyrinth of my blood opening like a raw, wet pulse in a room of glass. We are a tide of salt and sweat moving against the rigid architecture of the census. Our limbs tangling like the roots of a tree they tried to pave over. I feel the ceiling descending. The walls leaning in with the slow, grey gravity of an exclusion zone. But I find my space in the way your teeth catch my lower lip: a ...

The Sound Of Bo Belle

Search This Blog