Massacre

Is this loaf of bread a tank shell?

Is this flour or phosphorus?

Is my meal seasoned with shrapnel?

An explosion turns my body inside out

so my stomach can digest the rubble.

I am the one being consumed. 

Death feasts on us while we starve.

I exist for them only in that single breath

between the muzzle flash and my murder,

living in a sniper's cross-hairs, just a target, 

chosen for how my death demoralises others.

My brains garnish the debris.

A thin gravy of blood

is drizzled like jus in the dust. 

Apart from that I don't exist at all.

(Written on 29th February 2024, the Flour Massacre, Gaza)

The anonymous bride

She was just an undergarment.

That's all she was to him. 

There was nothing else. 

It wasn't that she had jilted him, 

slipping away from the ceremony naked,

leaving him holding an empty item of clothing.

The absence of a human female 

was deliberate, was part of the ritual. 

He was completely satisfied. 

He didn't need a woman. 

His needs did not extend 

beyond the social media post

in which he displayed 

this latest limp, torn trophy, 

to jubilant cohorts of online followers,

joined in celebration of her annihilation. 

His embrace with the woman

who once wore the abandoned lingerie

had already been arranged weeks earlier

by a random comrade he didn't know, 

who had inadvertently served as matchmaker, 

as שַׁדְּכָן, when he had pulled a trigger, 

or pushed a button to drop a bomb, 

and she had disappeared entirely

in a consummation of dust. Somewhere 

a wedding ring lost in the chaos 

sings to the night of other lives.

(Written in response to the phenomenon of members of the IDF sharing images of themselves posing with items of lingerie looted in Gaza)

 

Other poets that I admire

are so far out of my league, 

I can only aspire to what they achieve, 

effortless for them, impossible for me. 

Their words are a kind of high trapeze

that makes a myth of gravity. 

Not a mockery, but a myth:  

they demonstrate that thing 

which anchors me so firmly to the ground

simply does not exist. 

This is their gift to us:

the incomprehensibility of what they do.

They untie the knot of what we thought we knew,

understanding that tethers us to a lesser world,

and liberate us from the luxury of our chains.

Our souls must breathe miracles

in the upper atmosphere they inhabit

where their words cast aurora.

They reveal truths that make us immune to lies,

expose as lies long revered truths that bind us.

In a world in which we mean to be free,

they show us the only freedom that has meaning.

Carbonado

A hollow star palpitates and exhales. 

A nebula condenses like winter breath.

The chambers of its heart

are fortified by walls of black diamond.

The darkness they conceal

is darker than the darkest night, 

cold, hidden, tucked away, 

inside its blinding light.

The heart fractures. The star dies. 

Fragments are cast across a secret sky,

a shattered firmament mosaic

we scrawl upon and constellate

with our infinite capacity for myth, 

etching invented connections

across our flint-faced imagination

to chart the limits of our journey

making of the celestial sphere

a ceramic skull, a goblet

from which we drink to ourselves,

celebrating our false zodiac.

We degrade everything with trade.

Two and a half billion years later

a diver plucks black carbonado diamonds

from river bed gravel in Bahia. 

He does not know he feeds his family

by selling star-bones to monsters. 

We contain unknown astronomies of grief

cascading down the fathomless past. 

We are a confluence of loss. 

This fragile lament preceded voice

and seeks the silence where it began, 

the place we steal it from by singing. 

The abducted world 

whose organs we traffic

remembers its ancient origins

before any Eden we can dream of,

and innocence, hiding behind the light,

which no pimp scrutiny will expose, 

no sex cannibal appetite violate. 

A crab shell universe retreats

in the rock pool of our curiosity

where sea anemones blossom

only once the tide comes in

and leaves us out of our depth

so that we abandon the invasion

for which we pretend 

discovery is an excuse. 

Hope

When we are broken, 

and gather our scattered pieces,

searching through the ruins of life,

and struggle to put ourselves together,

finding some pieces are now missing,

and others no longer seem to fit, 

having recovered half an heirloom, 

a quarter of a keepsake, we ask 

what is the glue? What fills the gaps?

What stops us from just falling apart?

We inhale the dusty exhalation of the past,

breathe in the dying world's last breath 

in the desolate present, and see,

among the dry, dis-aggregated rubble of Gaza,

dismantled by bomb drop percussion,

a midday sun crawl blind 

in the un-anaesthetised noon, 

searching for lost limbs, amputated hours

pruned with random cruelty to evacuate the clock

by which we reckon when meals are shared, 

games played, poetry recited, God worshipped,

and discover we are all connected to one another,

connected by an outpouring of love, a deluge, 

and through each other to a deeper love 

no violence can erase, nor can despair deny 

we are held together by this embrace,

support each other when alone we fall apart.

The connective tissue of the world is love,

the surface tension deep within the heart,

and there is no death. In the blink of an eye

we change from being a raindrop to a ripple,

our lives completed in a detonation of love. 

Reflection

The cat walked past the mirror.

He didn't ignore it

because he can't recognise 

his own reflection. 

His indifference tells another story.

Every mirror has two surfaces,

each resting on top of the other, 

occupying the same space

but showing different views of time.

One is time as it is, 

immediate time, 

as experienced by animals, like the cat, 

the present time of pleasure and pain,

where panic and trance and ecstasy reside

The other is time that passes, 

imagined time, 

where we situate death and decay, 

where the future and the past reside

and all thought is hostage of agenda,

time that elapses in the working week 

where history rolls up its sleeves, 

and we manufacture cowardice 

and stupidity and guilt, 

and the inevitability of failure,

time where death is the end, 

rather than a mere moment 

connected to all others

from which life radiates into space

like ripples from a raindrop

to be preserved in the eternal present.

After the latest plague has coughed

its milky midnight spin-drift phlegm

glistening across a crowded room

to embrace me in galaxies of infection

don't write my name on my headstone.

Make its surface a mirror

in which I can share the universe 

with the other animals that wander past, 

while other people see only themselves.

Meaning

We argue not for truth, but for meaning. 

We crave meaning more than truth,

trying to grab it with facts for fingers, 

slippery eel like facts on octopus hands. 

We are in the redemption trade,

bartering moralities at the docks

imported from exotic philosophies.

I abstain from this disputed geography. 

We contour the world with right and wrong,

build walls on those imagined contours,

but your moral high ground is a morass. 

I am interested in truth, not meaning. 

I recognise the materiality, 

the instrumentality of the words

I use to tell you this. After all, 

it is the only language you speak,

but I would sing them to you

from the throat of a hungry bird

that will forget you immediately

once it is fed, howl and grunt

rather than audition for your approval,

and fill my ethics with yearning,

delivering myself to the mutant meaning

that staggers drunk in your understanding. 

I would rather whisper in your dead ear

with the lips of a worm

than use these words you read.

May you choke on any meaning 

you find in them. Truth, like clay,

inhaled by the Earth's geological lungs, 

is vivisected by your trowels and tools

as if you could ever reveal anything

you did not already think you know.

I would rather you baked it into bricks

to build temples that defile emptiness

and raise prayers to break the silence

in honest blasphemy, than pretend

that any meaning you find 

approximates the truth. 

May the idea of truth be forever a cage

for those who think it confers meaning. 

Words socialise grief and guilt. 

I'll tear your throat out without them,

paint your meaning on my teeth, 

greet the darkness as a friend, 

and welcome the waters come to drown me.

An autumn leaf

An autumn leaf, caught

in a frozen river: time

ends with its release. 

The child may not gaze

upon beauty forever:

an ugly business. 

This ugly business 

of adulthood:

as children

we were innocent

of beauty as birds

are innocent of sky, 

trees innocent of soil, 

ice innocent of winter.

Now, to look at beauty,

to dwell in its presence, 

would destroy us, 

so we destroy it. 

We interrupt and adjust,

contradict and correct

the beautiful. No wonder

it turns from us

with every printed page,

every counterfeit leaf.

Let me die, if I must, 

so that I can look

upon beauty once more.

I surrender to the thaw.

I can pretend

my final moments

are an eternity

if they are spent

looking at her face.