Abacus of Vertebrae

The testimony is a bird hitting a glass wall: a wet slap of feathers and a broken neck.

A girl stands in the witness box and her voice is a ghost: a frequency the court has been tuned to ignore.

The judge has eyes like cold marbles: he is looking for the watermark: the seal of the state: the signature of the predator.

He does not see the bruise blooming like a dark flower on the inner thigh: he does not hear the stutter that sounds like a machine gun in a small room.

He wants the ledger: the holy inventory of the slaughterhouse.

The public demands the files with a hunger that smells of copper and salt: they want the ink: they want the black and white confirmation of what the flesh has already screamed until its throat was raw.

They treat the paper as a relic: a sacred skin more precious than the girl’s own nervous system.

They would believe a dead tree before they believe a living woman.

This is the ultimate insult of the archive: the belief that the victim is a fiction until the rapist writes it down in his own hand.

The men are unctuous: they are coated in a film of expensive grease and the sweat of the untouchable.

Trump sits in the gold-leafed rot of his own ego: a man who treats the female form as a distressed asset to be seized: a landlord of the flesh who thinks a "grab" is a contract.

Mandelson glides through the shadows like a refined reptile: the Prince of Darkness sipping tea while the light is extinguished in a child’s eyes: a man whose very presence is a redaction: a master of the "didn't see" and the "wasn't there."

And the Prince: the hemophiliac ghost haunting the corridors of a dying empire: his hands down the slips of the dispossessed while his mother pays the bill for his silence.

They have mouths that smell of formaldehyde and vintage port: hands that have never known the callous of labour but know exactly how to dismantle a child.

The violation is a surgical entry into the soul: a mechanical failure of the human form.

It is the sound of a zipper like a serrated blade opening the air: the weight of a billion dollars pressing into the small of a back until the vertebrae click like an abacus counting the profit.

The pelvic bowl is a hinge they force until the wood splinters: until the anatomy is just a map of a hostile occupation.

It is the tearing of silk and the tearing of fibre: a wet: rhythmic thud that sounds like a butcher tenderising meat.

The skin is not a boundary but a fabric they rend: a raw material they soil because they own the factory and the loom.

Inside: the body is a cathedral being looted: the soft tissue shredded to make room for their gluttony.

The rape is not a crime to them: it is a dividend: a perk of the board: a surplus of power extracted from the bones of the poor.

The pain is a high: thin wire pulled taut across the throat: a surgical incision into the memory that will never stop bleeding.

The state is the pimp: the law is the lookout: and the media is the cleaning crew: mopping up the blood with broadsheets and distracting the masses with the theatre of the spectacle.

The white men in the suits are laughing: they are drinking scotch in rooms guarded by the very police who told the girls to go home and forget.

They know the files are just paper: they know the paper can be burned: shredded: lost: or hidden in a safe in a basement in Virginia.

The files are a shroud stitched from the discarded skin of the dispossessed.

The world waits for the redactions to be lifted as if the black bars are the only thing hiding the truth.

But the truth was always there: in the shaking hands: in the eyes that look at the floor because they can no longer bear the sight of the sky.

We have been conditioned to love the document more than the person: to trust the ledger more than the pulse.

We have been taught that a name on a list is more real than a body on a bed.

This is the logic of capital: the commodification of the scream: the transformation of trauma into a bibliography.

The testimony is discarded as "anecdotal": "unreliable": "emotional": while the spreadsheet is "objective": "fact": "evidence."

They have turned the girl into a footnote in the biography of a monster.

Burn the ledger: it is a distraction: a piece of theatre designed to keep you looking at the list instead of the throat.

Believe the survivor: she is the evidence: her scars are the only honest map of this century.

The anger is a rhythmic throb in the temple: a black fire that demands the names be shrieked from the rooftops of every tenement.

We do not want a trial: we want a reckoning: a total dismantling of the architecture that allowed the island to exist.

We want the hands that signed the logbooks to be held in the flame of their own making.

The girls are not victims: they are the stolen labour of the future: the revolutionary energy that the masters tried to bury in the sand.

The system is the sickness: and the files are just the inventory of the rot.

Wipe the chin of history and prepare for the strike.