Skip to main content

Frame 313

@shumakerart


The government says it wasn't drones,

just like they said the camera lied

when Zapruder's 8mm caught the skull

exploding backwards, physics screaming

against the lone gunman fairy tale.

 

Now we got Family Boat footage,

11:45 PM off Sidi Bou Said,

the Portuguese flag burning

as mechanical death drops from darkness,

six souls on deck extinguishing flames

while Tunisian officials call it

"a fire in a life jacket".

 

Same day Starmer stands at his podium,

mouth full of parliamentary honey,

declaring "no evidence of genocide"

while the Mediterranean burns red,

while children's bodies wash ashore

like broken campaign promises,

his tongue black with Palestinian ash.

 

The film doesn't lie.

Instagram pixels bleeding truth

across fibre optic cables,

more honesty than Downing Street's

daily briefings where genocide

becomes "self defence",

where five countries bombed

becomes "protecting democracy".

 

Gaza burns,

Lebanon bleeds,

Syria weeps,

Tunisia smolders,

Qatar's peace talks turn to ash,

and still they claim victimhood,

still they wrap themselves

in martyrdom's mask

while dropping white phosphorus

on refugee camps at teatime.

 

Frame by frame, I witness:

deliberate strikes on aid vessels,

Greta Thunberg's steering committee

scattered across Mediterranean waves,

while Starmer shakes Netanyahu's hand,

calls it "special relationship",

while our tax money buys bullets

that shatter Palestinian skulls like watermelons.

 

The stench of burning flesh

rises from five different countries

on the same September day

Starmer declares his conscience clear,

the same day he signs weapons deals

with his children's future,

trades their inheritance

for party unity.

 

But every drone they dropped

on the Family Boat only forged

the flotilla's hearts into steel,

their resolve harder than bunker walls,

their love for Palestine

burning brighter than phosphorus,

unsinkable as documented truth.

 

Same breath, same lie:

"We're just defending ourselves"

echoes from Tel Aviv to Westminster,

while the body count climbs

and Starmer counts his votes,

his conscience sold by the pound of flesh,

his hands sticky with children's blood.

 

Tonight a Palestinian mother

will search the rubble for her daughter,

will find only a small shoe,

a broken doll,

a severed hand

still clutching a piece of bread,

still warm.

 

Tomorrow Starmer will tell Parliament

there's no evidence of genocide

while that mother's screams

echo through every arms factory,

through every polling booth

where we pretend our votes are clean.

 

The drones came silent as cancer,

the families died like songs

cut short mid verse,

while millions march in London,

in Paris, in Berlin,

their voices swallowed by government silence,

their votes meaningless as prayers

in the face of arms deals

and diplomatic handshakes.

 

We watch from our kitchens,

powerless as our leaders

count oil money instead of bodies,

sign weapons contracts

instead of ceasefire agreements,

and in the morning

the world will wake up,

check the football scores,

and pretend we don't exist.

 

But we do exist.

We are the stones that break their teeth,

the salt that stings their conscience,

the olive trees that grow

through the cracks in their empire,

and no drone,

no parliament,

no silence

will ever erase us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

710 Days

They finally said the word. 710 days too late, but they said it.   Genocidal acts.   The careful counting while children stopped breathing. The documente d death, delayed decisions. The shuffle of papers while families screamed.   My Inner-Roma child asks me: "Why did they wait so long to say what we could see?"   I taste ash when I try to answer.   We know this rhythm how institutions measure murder in acceptable doses, how they academic-ise annihilation until it fits their forms.   The commission's words sit heavy in my stomach. Truth that burns the throat to speak: Recognition without action is just another form of complicity.   710 days of choosing to look away, to gather evidence instead of stopping bullets, to debate definitions while defining a people out of existence.   But some threw their bodies into the gears: Students occupying campuses, workers refusing to load weapons, artists breaking complicit silence.   The machine can be sto...
Post a Comment
Read more