The Sound Of Bo Belle

The city's gut-punch,  every breath a stolen thing,  a shallow gasp against the concrete press.  Mornings, flat-grey, a metallic tang on the tongue,  like a dead TV screen,  no signal, no sound,  just the hum of my own unravelling,  a low-grade fever in the bones.  Sirens, a banshee shriek,  ripping through the thin fabric of what I thought I was.  Lost.  A piece of flotsam in the gutter's slick,  no compass, no goddamn direction,  just the low thrum of the ache, always the ache.  The world, a smeared watercolour,  a phantom limb throbbing in the void,  the stench of exhaust and rotting hope,  a suffocating, meaningless blur,  where even shadows cast no truth. Then.  A crack in the concrete.  From the bitter earth, they rise.  The giants.  A primal, green religion, a silent, defiant refusal.  Their roots, deep-fisted,  clutching something true, something ancient, ...

The walls of Derry, they don't just whisper, they scream.  A guttural howl from Rossville Flats,  where the crimson gouged the tarmac,  a stain no verdict can wash clean.  To walk those streets,  feel the cold breath of ghosts clinging to every brick,  See the museum's silent, screaming evidence:  the gored cloth, a child's last breath,  The lead shrapnel torn from young flesh.  And the priest, murdered mid-prayer,  His cassock soaked, a sacred sacrifice.  Those rubber rounds, fat as a coloniser's thumb,  the bludgeon of Britain's 'law' ,  designed to brutalise,  to break the spirit,  not to save a soul. This suffering, a jagged seam of pain through the Troubles,  a direct consequence of Britain's imperial hand,  from the blanket men's defiance,  to the hunger strikers' dying breaths,  Each sacrifice, a link in their chain.  The scars are not just on these walls,  but etched into t...

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...