You

You’re a machine
rummaging the bins for a paper God
searching for yourself in the ripples of sulphuric rivers, 
of torn celebrity and vicious blades, 
slicing tongues and words
slaughtering language and laugh, 
shadows eaten by brick and mortar, 
wrapping themselves in the hard metal of heated wire
and black bitumen,
the tight fumes of grey industry,
the yellow forest of decay
fuck again
in polished flesh, scented and wet,
lubricated groans spoil the ancient
trajectory of stars,
catch the lacklustre of spirt,
the spilling of mind,
you
you’re a reckless menace cutting earth,
your pockets can hold only holes,
you bankrupt wings,
ruin warmth, 
the sclerosis of flight and time,
you unearth heaven,
you point with teeth grinning
at the shape of your dead,
lone coffins sail out towards the end
like pure planets looking for space,
your prisons
are not stone and wall
or cage and law,
they are decadence and knuckle
and sorrow and rainbow,
they are atonement and antipathy,
they are you and you are them,
you cut uneven,
your music dead, your stages stark,
your universities windowless,
ill pedagogue, perverse dictums,
yours is a horrible politics
one saddled on exploitation,
nepotism and decree, 
you know nothing of the heart
of the floored and the lonely
your courtrooms
are dominated by white wigs,
forged systems of justice and hammer,
the sentence choked in the language of life
I can’t breathe, 
reach out and touch
the eleventh minute for the last time
but it’s been the last time forever, 
shoot for the police, 
for cartoons drawn for profit and blood,
drawn for gun and war,
shoot for freedom of speech
for freedom to pray, 
for freedom to walk down a street with sweets
and make it home alive
to grow into the rest of your life,
shoot with poems in the heart, 
with fists gripping words like
freedom of speech is not absolute,  
because I’ve seen your people
your hushed and your censored, 
your exiled and your villainized   
you
where were your cameras and pundits
when we marched for women? 
Marched for Iraq?
Before anybody was Charlie, 
when it was not in our name,
for 200 Nigerian girls
for 2000 Nigerian bodies
for Palestine, for Diego Garcia,
for Guantanamo Bay, for the Aboriginal
burning his skin on the last embers of
your acerbic racism
one you’ve manufactured so well, 
your greatest export,
you
will never know what it’s like to fly
through the folds of love and compassion,
through the burning vein of another fallen being,
you’ll never feel that moment
when your heart for a second beats as something else
you’ll never know height,
you spray your sky with pestilence
choke the sun with burly clouds,
your world collapsing under pistons and cogs,
your art is rust, your mainstream polluted,
you live with the lethargy of skeletons
tracing over the faint filaments that flicker and die,
you’re full of cock and rage
and cunt and spit
drowning alive in whirls of neon, 
of electricity,
you’re gone, 
there’s nothing left,
your children dream to rob each other of their innocence,
you teach them your greed, your capitalism and your supremacy,
your seeds are bullets, precise and intractable,
your muscles are tanks,
your strength is destruction, 
your clothes are flags
and your hands
are complete chaos.
Yes I know you, 
where you come from and where you go, 
why you do it and why you did it,
so when my son comes into this world
and asks me one very ordinary day
daddy why?
I’ll bring him in close, holding his little hand,
his chest beating and his eyes reflecting the flames, 
then in that moment I’ll confess
because there’s still Hope,
there’s still Love
there’s still You.