Slavering dogs and screams

saturate impermeable walls

 

like

 

reptilian brain

holds trauma…

 

fucked into flesh

cuffed and beaten

 

transgenerational stigmatisation

breaks a soul

 

like

 

Sounds and smells of oppression

trigger memories…

 

torn from roots

burned and banished

 

like a

 

Genocide…

 

 

Wings migrate when seasons shift,

a subtle breeze will turn…

 

low murmurs ‘neath new feathers lift

their flight away from home…

 

un-compassed in their domestic fledge

unknowing of its end,

 

they ride the winds of nature’s pledge

wherever they may send.

 

Yet not the same for men as birds,

with knowledge of return…

 

for them just hateful fists and words

that wish their homelands burn…

 

and what of those that come anew?

Not born of blood or soil,

 

will they feel safe as free men do?

No State their lives to spoil.

 

There’s a poem waiting for me

she’s upstairs in my room,

she’s lying legs akimbo

and howling at the moon.

 

She’s been there since this morning

rearranging all my thoughts,

burning all my crosses

obstructing all my noughts.

 

Every line she is transmitting

gets scrambled in my head,

she’s adding and omitting

from the pages of my bed.

 

Oh to climb the hallowed stairs

to claim the sacred key,

to unlock that which she shares

so exclusively with me…

 

she’s the mistress I can’t woo

she’s the siren of my luck

she’s the one I bow down to

though will never get to fuck.

 

 

 

 

Dreams are real confessions

of bad deeds never done,

the ghosts of our obsessions,

our shackles come undone…

 

they are day release concessions

granted unto us at night,

the suspension of repression

to see the evil that we might…

 

do to one-another

if uninhibited and free,

in a world that was some other,

where in darkness we could see…

 

that the light which holds us fast

is the lie we hide behind,

and the mould in which we’re cast

lives in the kingdom of the blind.