The Sound Of Bo Belle

Young Fascist (Italian Child): Alison Mason Kingsbury: Life and Art Council flat, East London, damp wall,s mould in the corners VHS tracking lines cutting static through James Dean's face the flicker of the TV, the only warmth Rebel Without a Cause & I'm seven years old Romani no passport HUNGRY swallowing that red jacket mythology like it's bread like it's BELONGING [beat] I wanted to be SEEN so badly, I didn't care what was doing the seeing [beat] The Wild One 1953 Brando all fuck-you jawline by 1973 he's sending Sacheen Littlefeather to the Oscars & she's saying "we do not have the right to take away land and dignity" & the audience BOOS & John Wayne has to be PHYSICALLY RESTRAINED from dragging her off stage & Hollywood makes him PAY by The Island of Dr. Moreau 1996 they've got him in a muumuu FAT joke CRAZY joke HAS-BEEN because he chose TRUTH over the golden statue [beat] while Brando gets destroyed for DISSENT [beat] ...

They kidnapped Maduro on a Tuesday. Not arrested. Kidnapped. Hands on flesh, body moved against its will, the physical fact of being grabbed, of sovereignty ending where fingers grip arm, where a man becomes cargo, where the border of your skin means nothing when empire decides otherwise. Snatched like a purse, like prey, like your body is just matter to be relocated, like the state can reach across lines on a map and take you, move you, cage you, because power is always, finally, about bodies— who gets to move them, who gets to stop them, whose flesh is sacred, whose is just meat to be processed. Call it what it is: piracy with paperwork, the same hands that throttled Allende, that drowned Lumumba in his own blood, that wrote “regime change” in the margins of every country that dared to keep its own oil. The news says “detained” and I want to vomit. The news has always been a clean word for a dirty thing, a pressed shirt over a broken rib cage, and we swallow it, we let it slide down ...