I love you in the language they tried to bury
mo ghrá, miro kamipe
syllables that taste like dirt and defiance,
the kind you swallow when the bailiffs come,
When your mother won't look at you,
when you're too tired to be brave.
I don't remember when I first saw you
maybe at the thing in South Bank, maybe before,
Maybe we've been circling each other
in all the rooms where people like us end up:
the ones with bad lighting and good anger,
where someone's always collecting for bail funds
and the tea tastes like solidarity and dust,
where we're all pretending we're not as scared as we are.
I love you means: I see the occupation in your eyes.
It means your grandmother's hands, and mine,
could've been in the same mass grave
if the century had turned differently.
Gaza burns, and I can't stop crying.
Kabul starves, and you go silent for three days.
The Calais camps are bulldozed again
and we hold each other like drowning,
like maybe if we grip hard enough
we can keep each other here.
We fuck in the shadow of it
not escape, not denial,
But the animal insistence that our bodies
still deserve pleasure,
still deserve each other,
even when pleasure feels like betrayal
of everyone who didn't make it this far.
Your mouth on my neck at the vigil
and I'm crying and coming and neither of us knows
which is which anymore.
We've made love in squatted buildings,
in the back of vans fleeing police,
against the wall of a community centre
Twenty minutes before we had to speak
about genocide to a room that didn't want to hear it,
And afterwards, you held me
while I vomited panic into a bin,
while my body did what my mouth couldn't
expelled the grief I'd been swallowing all night.
There is two people who know how to stop bleeding
learning to be gentle with each other
when gentleness feels like forgetting everyone else.
I think about the Romani partisans who fought the Nazis.
I think about the Irish hunger strikers who chose death over surrender.
I think about every colonised person who loved anyway.
We fight like it's the only language left.
About tactics. About trauma hierarchy.
About whether I'm allowed to be this tired.
About whether you're allowed to still hope.
You say I romanticise death.
I say you've forgotten they're killing us
just slow enough we're supposed to call it living.
You say: We have to believe we can win.
I say: We have to believe it's worth it even if we don't.
We're both right. We're both drowning.
We fuck it out and wake up
to seventeen notifications about another massacre
and I can't breathe, and you make tea
because tea is what we do
when there's nothing else to do.
Sometimes we win small.
The case gets dropped. The eviction gets delayed.
Someone smuggles good whiskey into the squat
and we dance like we're not marked for death,
like our bodies are allowed to be joyful,
like the empire hasn't already written our endings.
You spin me and I'm laughing
And for five minutes, I forget
and then I remember
And the forgetting was the point.
Sometimes you teach me words in your language
and I teach you words in mine—
not the ones they made into slurs
but the ones they never got to touch,
the ones our grandmothers kept hidden
in songs, in stories, in the way they held us.
We're rebuilding something
they thought they'd destroyed
not just resistance but renaissance,
not just survival but celebration,
reclaiming the stories they tried to bury,
the art they said we couldn't make,
the future they said we didn't deserve.
I love you in the space between
the petrol bomb and the poem,
In the argument about whether we should be making art
or making Molotovs,
in the knowledge that I'll probably do both
and hate myself either way.
At the meeting, they talk about occupied peoples
Palestine, Ireland, Kashmir
And I wait for someone to say it.
No one ever says it.
We've been here the whole time,
stateless before states were invented,
and still they can't see us in the room.
You squeeze my hand under the table.
It doesn't fix it but it helps.
My ancestors were called Zigeuner, yours tinker
slurs that sound like spitting,
like the noise a boot makes on a neck,
like the word the cop used
When he shoved a mother into the van,
When he told a grandmother to move along,
When he looked at me like I was already evidence.
We wear them now like war paint,
like the names of the dead,
like promises we're still trying to keep
to people who never got to keep any.
The empire is eating itself
and we're watching it choke
But it's taking so fucking long
And people keep dying while we wait.
We're planning next month's action.
We're writing grant applications for the community space.
We're holding each other through nightmares
that aren't nightmares because they already happened
and they're still happening
And they'll keep happening.
Last week, we planted a flag in the sky
and called it ours
just for a minute, just to prove we could,
just to see the look on their faces
When we claimed something back.
It was stupid. It was perfect.
You laughed so hard you cried
and I thought: This. This is what we're fighting for.
Not the grand revolution,
not the distant future
this moment, this laughter,
this petty fucking victory
in a sky that was never theirs to take.
I love you and it doesn't save anyone.
I love you and children still drown in the channel.
I love you and the far-right still marches.
I love you and my cousin still can't get housing.
I love you and your sister still got deported.
I love you and it matters anyway—
not because love is revolutionary
but because they've spent centuries
trying to convince us
we don't deserve it,
don't deserve softness,
don't deserve each other,
don't deserve to be anything
but grateful for survival.
This is the work:
showing up to the picket line hungover.
Translating legal documents at 3am.
Bailing each other out.
Forgetting to eat, then forcing each other to.
Screaming at each other about strategy,
about whether hope is a tactic or a trap.
Holding space for grief that has no bottom,
for rage that has no outlet,
for love that feels like the only honest thing left.
Your hand in mine at the border.
My head on your shoulder at the occupation.
The way we've learned to sleep
in rooms that aren't ours,
on land that was never theirs to take,
in a love that refuses to be
collateral damage.
Sometimes I look at you and think:
We're going to lose.
The empire will outlive us.
Our children, if we have them, will fight the same fights.
And then I think:
But not today.
Today we're still here.
Today I still love you.
Today that still means something
we planted a flag in thier sky and made it ours,
even if just for a minute.
They want us dead or grateful or silent.
We choose this fourth thing:
alive and raging and bound to each other
not by softness but by recognition
You know what it costs to still be here.
You know what I've lost to be standing.
You know why I flinch at sirens,
why I can't watch the news anymore,
why some days I can't get out of bed
and you don't ask me to explain,
you just climb in next to me
and we breathe together
until breathing feels possible again.
So do I.
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