Socialism or Pervertism

 The island is a suppurating pelvic floor.

A hip bone rising from the grey silt of the Atlantic,

pinned under the weight of a fifty-storey phallus of glass and steel,

an engorged monument to the theft of breath and the industrialisation of the womb.

This is the medical report of the siege.

The light is a brownout.

The light is a flicker.

The light is the dying pulse of a patient on the table.

It is the smell of sweat, diesel, and the sharp metallic tang of a speculum in a cold room.

The blockade is a catheter of rusted iron,

draining the vitality of the state into the gutters of the north.

Donald Trump is the rapist in the room.

He is a creature of cold fat and expensive grease;

His pores leak black industrial oil onto the pale linen of the bedsheets.

He does not look at the face.

He looks at the soil as if it were a slit in a dress.

He looks at the child as if she were a map to be folded and tucked into a pocket of debt.

He’s a man who knows a little about small islands.

He knows the geography of the private beach and the silent room.

He knows the friction of the young against the coldness of the old.

He is the curator of the little black book of anatomy.

He marks the map with the same turgid saliva he leaves on the collar of a girl.

He sees the deep minerals as marrow to be sucked,

the very veins of the earth being bled into a cold bucket until the planet is a hollow husk.

The blockade is the hand over the mouth during the act.

It is the silence of the room while the world watches through the keyhole of the UN.

The synapses are misfiring now, a dying neon sign flickering in the skull.

The fog is rolling in, thick with the smell of old meat and yellowed ego.

He forgets the names of the generals he bought.

He forgets the price of the sugar and the weight of the debt.

He forgets the location of the cities he tried to unzip.

The dementia is a white screen, a blank cheque, a slow erasing of the crime.

But the ghost of the girl is a permanent fixture.

The tear she shed is a salt-burn on his palm that will not heal.

It is an acid that eats through the grease and the expensive linen.

He may lose the world, he may lose the map, he may lose the thread of his own breath,

but the memory of the violation is a needle that stays in the groove.

It is the one thing the fog cannot swallow: the salt, the scream, the non-consent.

This is the hubris of the bully of the world.

The bloated arrogance of an empire that thinks the sun is its private lamp.

It is the choice we face: socialism or pervertism.

The collective breath of the many or the private violation of the one.

The pervertism of the suite, the pervertism of the drone, the pervertism of the bank.

All empires fall when the blood turns to iron and the soil refuses to yield.

The bully is just a man in a wet sheet,

shaking a fist at a tide he cannot command,

a geriatric predator drowning in the grease of his own history.

It is the physical sensation of the graft being forced.

The surgical sewing of a dead, grey limb onto the pulsing hip of the state.

The needle of the north biting into the sovereign skin to attach a parasite that can not breathe.

The grinding of metal on bone.

The sound of a border tearing like rusted iron.

The sound of a child’s breath catching in a throat of concrete dust.

The oil stains the sheets like a dark permanent bruise.

It is the fluid of a machine that knows no intimacy.

Only acquisition.

Only the slick, rhythmic pump of the extraction.

The machine stalls.

The gears grind to a halt because the island refused to be the lubricant.

The revolution is the muscle that says no.

It is the iron in the blood that refuses to be magnetised by his hoard.

He fumbles at the latch with palms that have never known a shovel,

confused that the dirt does not turn to gold when he pisses on it.

The revolution is the body rejecting the transplant.

The dead limb falls away, necrotic and useless.

It is the hand of the island catching his fingers in the industrial press.

The orifices of the state are now lined with razors.

He expected a soft, yielding wetness, but he found teeth.

The revolution is the only consent we recognise.

It is the vomit that expels the gold.

It is the saltwater that scours the grease from the bedsheets.

The medical report is closed.

Diagnosis: Permanent Resistance.

The patient is no longer on the table.

The patient is the table, the room, the walls, the air.

The sheets are a black ash scattered in the trade winds.

The room is empty of the fat.

The machine is a carcass of rusted iron,

a silent monument to the failure of the touch.

The island is a throat that has learned to scream in silence.

Unyielding.

Unbroken.

The salt in the wound of the empire.