Verdict in Viscera

The nation is a white room with no corners.

It smells of bleach.

It smells of the sharp, metallic tang of the law.

The state is not at the keyhole:

it is the cold, clinical light that refuses to flicker.

It is the sudden chill of the sheet against my spine.

The hard, unyielding edges of the iron frame.

Your mouth is a trespass on a map they have not yet digitised.

A secret union of the rain-heavy moss of the island

and the iron-red dust of the road.

Two stolen territories finding a common border in the dark.

I want to drown the sirens in the heavy, industrial heat of your throat.

To feel the interior labyrinth of my blood opening

like a raw, wet pulse in a room of glass.

We are a tide of salt and sweat moving

against the rigid architecture of the census.

Our limbs tangling like the roots of a tree they tried to pave over.

I feel the ceiling descending.

The walls leaning in with the slow, grey gravity of an exclusion zone.

But I find my space in the way your teeth catch my lower lip:

a slow, sensory crushing

where the only borders left are the ones we draw with our tongues.

Your breath is a warm, lawless wind in the hollow of my throat.

Turning the miles they took from us into a private, humid possession.

It is the friction of the unwanted.

A rhythmic undoing of their programmes.

Their charts.

Their cold, parliamentary distances.

Every nerve is an insurgent.

Every touch a refusal to be surveyed.

A wet, dark counter-history written in the language of the pulse.

We are reclaiming the square footage of this mattress.

Turning the final notice into a map of our own desire.

A territory they cannot police

because it is written in the fluid of our bodies.

Our souls are two languages they tried to bury in the same shallow pit.

Now rising as a single, jagged dialect of the skin.

You carry the cold, anaerobic memory of the peat.

The long silence of the gallows-tree.

And I carry the iron-red dust of every road they tried to block with lead.

We are the salt of the island meeting the soot of the unmapped hearth.

A convergence of two hungers in the same cold air.

This is not just a haunting:

it is a physical genealogy of the dispossessed.

The way your knuckles are the stones of an occupied street.

And my spine is the axle of a wagon they set ablaze.

The soul is the heat of the riot in the bone.

A shared, ancient friction

that turns our displacement into the only home we have ever known.

Your hands are heavy.

They possess me like a seized asset.

My body is a site of unauthorised occupation:

every moan is a riot in the making.

We grind the law into the floorboards until the wood splinters.

We fuck with the frantic energy of a barricade

being built from the wreckage of the wardrobe.

The world is ending in the sound of heavy machinery.

In the locking of the perimeter.

The fire outside is the only candle we need.

We are the grit in the engine.

The unwashed.

The uncounted.

We are the wet, thumping heart of the unwanted.

They want a clean history.

A sterile line of descent.

We give them the stain.

We give them the smear.

We give them the raw, filthy evidence of our existence.

Drink the apocalypse from my mouth

before they shut off the lights.