After Bobby Sands: The Filton Six, 2025

They are doing it again.
Not in history.
In cells two hours from here.
People whose names you don't know
are in the days when their kidneys are drowning in their own toxins.
Their bodies are eating their hearts
not metaphor: medical fact,
cardiac muscle broken down for fuel,
myocardium torn apart cell by cell,
bodies cannibalising themselves
to keep brains alive
One more hour.
You are reading this.
Your eyes are moving across a screen.
They are dying.
Right now.
While you blink.

1981: Thatcher ate breakfast
while Bobby Sands' organs failed.
Bacon. Toast. Marmalade.
She slept fine, the papers said.
Probably fucked her husband after.
Came home from Parliament
and had a bath
while a man's heart ate itself
two hundred miles away.

2025: Starmer eats dinner
while Filton's hunger strikers
count down to nothing.
Different party.
Same appetite for ghosts.
Same ability to sleep.
Same capacity to look in the mirror
and see a human being
instead of what he is:
a man who could stop death
with a phone call
and chooses not to.

The Iron Lady said: Crime is crime is crime.
The Human Rights Lawyer says: Difficult decisions.
Both of them could stop it.
Neither of them does.
This is not a failure of imagination.
This is not bureaucracy.
This is murder.
Slow. Documented. Deliberate.
This is what the empire looks like
when it's decided who counts as human
and who counts as meat.

Yesterday, a video went viral:
white woman on a plane to Málaga,
crying because someone reclined their seat.
Four million views.
Think pieces in every paper.
Morning television debates
about aeroplane etiquette,
personal space,
The erosion of common courtesy.

Today, six people in prison
are shitting blood.
Their gums are bleeding.
Their hair is falling out in clumps.
Their hearts are arrhythmic
skipping beats, struggling,
trying to pump blood
with muscle that's being digested
for fuel.

The Guardian: page 19, two paragraphs.
The BBC: silence.
The Times: silence.
Sky News: nothing.
ITV: nothing.
But they'll spend twenty minutes
on the fucking plane woman.
They'll interview her.
They'll get expert opinions
on reclining etiquette.
They'll make her into a meme.

Six people are dying in British cages
and the media has decided
that a white woman's discomfort at 30,000 feet
is more newsworthy
than brown and black bodies
eating themselves alive
on British soil.

This is not an accident.
This is not editorial oversight.
This is genocide by silence.
This is how the empire murders now, 
not with gas chambers,
but with the absence of cameras.
The plane will be cleaned by Monday.
They could be dead by Sunday.
Guess which one gets the prime minister's attention.
Guess which one gets yours.

This is what's happening right now:
Their stomachs are digesting themselves.
The hydrochloric acid that should break down food
is breaking down the stomach lining instead.
Ulcers. Bleeding. The body eating its own walls.
Their muscles are gone.
Not "getting weak"—gone.
Catabolised. Broken down into amino acids
and burned for energy.

Their legs won't hold them anymore.
They can't walk to the toilet.
They piss themselves.
They shit themselves.
And they can't clean themselves
because lifting their arms
takes more energy than their bodies have left.
Their hearts are eating themselves.
Cardiac muscle—the muscle that has to beat
100,000 times a day just to keep you alive—
is being catabolised.
Each heartbeat is weaker than the last.
Each heartbeat brings them closer
to the one that won't come.

Their brains are starving.
Glucose-deprived, shutting down
non-essential functions first:
Memory. Concentration. Emotional regulation.
Then the essential ones:
Vision. Hearing. Balance.
They can't focus their eyes anymore.
They can't remember their mothers' faces.
They can't remember why they started this.
But they remember one thing:
They will not break.
Their breath smells sweet.
Ketones. Acetone. Nail polish remover.
The smell of a body burning itself.
If you were in the cell with them
You'd smell it
that chemical sweetness
That means the body has run out of everything else
and is now burning its own organs for fuel.

Their skin is grey.
Not pale—grey.
The colour of something already dead
But hasn't stopped moving yet.
Jaundiced around the edges
because their livers are failing.
Bruised everywhere
because their blood doesn't clot anymore.

They're cold.
Not "feeling cold"—cold.
Hypothermic.
No fat left to insulate.
No energy left to generate heat.
Their core temperature dropping
degree by degree
toward the temperature of the cell
toward the temperature of a corpse.

They can't sleep
because their hearts are beating too fast, too slow, too irregular.
Because their kidneys are failing, 
and the urea in their blood is making them itch.
Because their electrolytes are so imbalanced,
their muscles are cramping, spasming, seizing.
Because their brains are hallucinating—
seeing things that aren't there,
hearing voices,
feeling insects crawling on their skin.

They can't think straight anymore.
Cognitive function declining.
Confusion. Disorientation.
They don't know what day it is.
They don't know how long it's been.
Time has become meaningless
when every second is the same:
pain, weakness, the slow shutdown
of everything that makes a body work.
And they're still refusing.
Still saying no.
Still holding the line
with bodies that are barely bodies anymore.

This is happening right now.
Not in a poem.
Not in history.
In Prison.
In Britain.
In 2025.
While you're reading this.
While Starmer's eating dinner.
While the BBC talks about the weather.

Long Kesh, 1981:
Bobby Sands on day 46
couldn't see anymore.
Blind. Organs failing.
His mother came to visit
and he didn't recognise her voice.
Day 51: He couldn't hear.
Day 59: He couldn't speak.
Day 66: He died.
Five stone twelve pounds.
A grown man
reduced to the weight of a seven-year-old child.
They didn't let his mother see the body.
Not for dignity.
Because what was left
wasn't recognisable as human.
The body had eaten everything
fat, muscle, organs
until there was nothing left
but skin stretched over bone
and a face that looked like a skull
with eyes still in it.
His coffin was closed.
100,000 people walked behind it.

Thatcher never apologised.
Never said his name.
Never admitted she could have stopped it
with a phone call.
She died at the Ritz.
Eighty-seven years old.
Stroke. Quick. Clean.
When she died, we danced in the streets.
"Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead"
hit number two in the charts.
Not far enough.
Should have been number one.

Gaza, 2024:
Yazan Kafarneh was ten years old.
Cerebral palsy.
Couldn't move.
Couldn't flee.
Couldn't forage in the rubble
for food.
He needed special formula.
Israel blocked it.
For months.
Deliberately.
His mother watched him disappear.
Photographed him every day—
documenting the murder,
making evidence of genocide.
First the fat went.
Then the muscle.
Then the light in his eyes.
Twenty-nine pounds when he died.
A ten-year-old boy
who weighed less than a toddler.
His mother posted the photos online.
Begged the world to see.
The world looked away.
Britain sold Israel the parts for the bombs
that made the siege
that starved Yazan Kafarneh.

Starmer calls this complex.
Starmer calls this difficult.
Starmer signed the arms deals
and went home for dinner.

Britain, 2025:
Six of the Filton 24.
Some of them could be from Gaza.
Survive the siege.
Survive the starvation.
Fled to Britain.
And Britain puts them in a cage
and is starving them again.
Escaped one empire's bombs
only to meet another empire's bureaucracy,
which kills just as efficiently
but with better paperwork.
From Long Kesh to Gaza to Britain:
the same machine,
different accents,
same body count,
same indifference,
same ability to eat dinner
while people die.

The hunger strike means:
The throat becomes a checkpoint.
Closed. Militarised.
No food passes.
The body becomes the border
The empire cannot cross.
The stomach becomes a battlefield.
The heart becomes a time bomb.
The brain becomes the last soldier
holding the line
on fumes, on nothing,
on the single thought:
We will not break.

They have turned their bodies
into weapons
because it's the only weapon
The empire hasn't taken yet.
Their bodies are the last territory
The state will never occupy.
And they will burn it down
cell by cell,
organ by organ,
heartbeat by heartbeat—
before they let the empire have it.

Bobby Sands wrote on the walls
with his own shit
when they took his pen.
Shit becomes ink.
Piss becomes protest.
Blood becomes testimony.
Vomit becomes voice.
The body, that soft machine,
becomes a factory
producing nothing but refusal.

In Gaza, children write their names
on their arms in marker
before the bombs come
so their bodies can be identified
after.

In Britain, they write letters
with hands shaking so badly
They can barely hold the pen.
One letter said:
We are not trying to die.
We are trying to be seen.
But we're not looking.

We're watching videos
of women crying on planes.
We're scrolling past.
We're having dinner.
We're going to bed.
Thatcher died comfortably.
Starmer will too.
They'll both die in beds
with clean sheets
and morphine
and people who love them
holding their hands.
They will die full.
They will die warm.
They will die having convinced themselves
They made the tough choices,
the necessary choices,
The choices that history will vindicate.

But history won't.
History will call this what it is:
Murder.
Genocide.
State-sanctioned death
by bureaucratic indifference.
And the six in Prison
If they die,
and they will die
if we don't stop this
They will haunt Starmer
The way Sands haunts Thatcher.
They will be there in every speech about human rights.
They will be there at every Labour conference.
They will be there in the history books.
They will be there in the mirror
When he tries to see a human being
and sees a murderer instead.

But ghosts are cold comfort
when you're dead.
You
You can't stand up anymore.
Your legs won't hold you.
You try—you have to piss, 
but your muscles don't respond.
You fall.
The floor is cold.
You can't get up.
You lie there
in your own piss
too weak to move
too weak to care.
You can't see straight.
The world is blurry, grey at the edges.
You try to focus on the ceiling
but your eyes won't work.

Everything is fading.
You can't hear properly.
There's ringing in your ears.
Someone is talking to you
a guard? a doctor?
but you can't make out the words.
Everything sounds like it's underwater.

You can't remember.
Your mother's face.
Your sister's name.
The reason you started this.
Your brain is shutting down
non-essential functions
to keep you alive
One more hour.
You can feel your heart.
Not beating—struggling.
Irregular. Arrhythmic.
Skipping beats.
You can feel it failing.
You know what that means.
You're not hungry anymore.
That's the worst part.
When the hunger stops,
you know you're dying.
The body has given up asking for food.
The body is eating itself
And there's nothing left to eat.

You're cold.
So cold.
No amount of blankets helps.
Your core temperature is dropping.
You're becoming the temperature
of the room,
of the cell,
of a corpse.
You know you're dying.
You can feel it.
Every system is shutting down.
Every organ is failing.
Every heartbeat weaker than the last.

And Starmer is eating dinner.
And the BBC is talking about the weather.
And the plane video has five million views now.
And no one is coming.
This is what it feels like.
This is what's happening.
Right now.
To six people
whose names you don't know
in a prison two hours from here.
The hunger strike is the last language
of the unheard.

It says:
You have taken everything.
Our countries.
Our freedom.
Our names.
Our voices.
But you cannot take this:
Our refusal.
Our bodies are the last territory
You will never occupy.
And we will burn them down, 
fat, muscle, organs, heart,
before we let you have them.

From Long Kesh to Gaza to Britain,
the body speaks the same sentence:
We would rather die free
than live in your cages.
But they don't want to die.
They want to be seen.
They want you to look.
They want you to care.
They want you to do something.
And you're reading this poem
and doing nothing.

Six of the Filton 24.
Still breathing.
Barely.
Their names:
I won't tell you yet.
Because if I do
and they die,
This poem becomes their eulogy
instead of their alarm.
But I'll tell you this:
They have mothers.
Somewhere—UK, Syria, Sudan, Gaza—
maybe alive, maybe dead,
maybe not knowing
Their children are dying
in British cages.
They have names their mothers gave them.
They have bodies that are eating themselves.
They have hours.
Maybe days.
Not long.

You are reading this poem.
They are dying.
Starmer could stop it with a phone call.
He won't.
Unless you make him.
Call your MP.
Call Starmer's office.
Call the Home Office.
Call the BBC and ask them
why six people dying in British prisons
is less newsworthy
than a woman crying on a plane.

Make them say their names.
Make them see their bodies.
Make them feel their deaths.
Or don't.
Keep scrolling.
Go to bed.
Have dinner.
Pretend you didn't know.
But you know now.
You can't unknow this.
And when they die
if they die
You'll know
You read this poem
and did nothing.

Ní bheidh ár leithéidí arís ann.
We shall not see their like again.
But their ghosts will not rest.
Not until every cage is empty.
Not until every siege is lifted.
Not until every hunger striker
can eat again
in freedom.

Tiocfaidh ár lá.
Our day will come.
But their day is ending.
Right now.
While you read this.
While you blink.
While you breathe.
Their bodies are eating their hearts.
Their hearts are failing.
Their time is running out.

And we are letting it happen.
Stop letting it happen.