Read This

When you read this
Yes you the young guys in jeans
Jewelling today’s streets
Making tomorrows’ yesterdays

Yes you are the pulses of time
That the old-nut-bags do not listen to
Yes you tomorrows’ bakers
Baking tomorrows’ clays and shapes

Yes you mark my words
Tomorrows are not unreal or virtual
They are your yesterdays waiting to be made
Shape them in your dreams’ designs

Otherwise they will kick your bones
The bones that steel your marrows
Unless you shape them right
They will be scorpion-dragon-breath burning your flesh

When you read this
I would like you to read
Carefully as though your breath depends on it
As though this is the oxygen to your dying lungs

As though your ipods have no power to play on
As though your facebook is defaced
As though your mobiles have no signals
As though your mates are forming corpses in lands you have never heard of
As though your brother was all red-spread-meat-pieces red-blood on Afghan walls
As though your sister was all silence-wrapped in a
Dead-wood coffin’s lie-flag on a morgue
As though your boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or mother or father was now no more
But a corpse on the bullet-holed desert sand gathering screams
Of helpless children’s rushing scared feet beneath the falling dust and fumes of fighting

I would yes I would like you to see the promotional videos
Outside you tube dot com frames
Outside their zealous musical accompaniments
Outside the photo frames of flickr or chicks and tsars
Outside your emoticons and immings and beamings of cyber patrols
Outside the boxes of televisions and radios and tele-magnetic-optics
Outside of David Blane outside of instant Guinness Book of Records
Outside the papers of the gun and hun and tun and run
Outside the dejaying and dance-floor-cascading sweat-harpooned heat-muds
Outside just for fun for there is no fun in shooting a baby or defacing a bud
Outside your set Monday to Friday and weekend bricks of me and mine
And outside your I don’t care or give a damn designer glasses
For you will have to stand up like anyone else when asked
On to the shaking platforms and make account for a Hitler that you could have stopped
Or worse still you let yourself become trained killers and assassins
Because you did not give a damn or care enough to choose

I would like you to consider
Seriously for you cannot say that you are bored
When your legs are torn apart somewhere in Somalia
Or your eyes spread over the sands of Iraq or Afghanistan
Or your friend’s dead body breaks the coffin-wood silence
Taking in the incessant rock of tears of their loved ones on the violently silent tarmac
Kicking your disabled wheel chair and your bone-morrow burning in tears
Of the sand-muscles of your torn-flour-soul

I would like you to consider the guns
The barrels the mortars the bombs and the bayonets
The gun powders the killing machines that you manned
There babies were torn out of their mothers’ wombs
Because of your dropping bombs at the enemies
Remember the fumes the flames the screams the scolding
Remember the runs the fears the angers the eating away of your flesh in your head
The heat the fires the jungle-jingle of death and blood fulfilling your nightmares

These badges these so called honours these media reports these paper-pieces
These printed rubbish these medallions and marked menacing moronic
Masked mural of your servitude to become a killer
A trained killer wearing razzmatazz badges and insignias
All boils down to your nightmare-boiled bed tilling you in it
The inferno in which your soul now burns as a wheel chair
Of a disabled stuck in your fire that no one can fathom

I would like you to read this carefully my son
I would like you to read this rather carefully my daughter
I would like you to read this as though this is your last breathe
This is the only avenue to which you can run to scream a rose out
This is the only path to which you can run to make a choice form
To hang yourself up bridging the bud and the flower in you
Below the Sistine Chapel here is the only note for you to sing
The only names that you can scream out and sing is Romeo and Juliet

Thus my child yes I am talking to you
There is no medal worth than your being in tact
There in no insignia significant enough for you to choose to be a killer
There is no prize or pride or prime or enigma in deciding to become a paid murderer
Wasting your entire life to learn to kill and wait to be an opportune assassin
And then live in nightmare’s fire-blade on scorpion bed sweat-blood wet
For now the assassin is hunted and haunted in dark-flowing lava of nightmares
And no one cares for they had got your serving and paid for it
Now you are the one keep paying keep paying
Only the banks never cease to call on for payments
Eternal payments that you keep on making and marking
On this multiplied mini unfolding eternities

There is no song or rainbow
In muddying yourself with bloods
There is no love in the eyes of the Nimrod
There is no cool in being a dark-fire angel of death and screams
There is no ripple of smartness in the sharp-tongued-stormy swiftness ocean
Of your movement in killing an enemy for who or what is an enemy

Thus when you are told
Be a soldier in the army: scream away and out
When they ask you to watch the video to join the Navy or the air force
Or when you are shown the utter coolness of becoming an agent
Scream away as far as you could go and become a forest ranger
Or a teacher or a shop attendant or a lollipop lady
Or better still take jobs made up jobs that save the lilies and lobsters
Do not my child buy propaganda’s PR-buttered knives
Do not decide to chop your own onion-soul
For you will be cutting yourself not the Afghans or Iraqis
For there is no pride in becoming a murdering killer or assassin

All these badges and respectable uniforms will not be enough
Even though well oiled hung-on fronted and filed onto your person
None will be enough to convince you that you had not killed
That cheetah’s burning eyes will haunt you forever clawing on your shadows
And onto the spread echoes of your footsteps that only resonate memories
Of your dying comrades in front of you while you were engaged in shooting


There is no such thing as country or nation
That needs defending for there is no defence in murders
There is none and cannot be any defence in slaughtering
Even if paid for by so called thugs that run the market or their governments
Even though the paid for generals and their parrots who abuse in training filed
And brain wash you with cold lies and ensure that they multiply as mosquitoes


No one can ask of you to be a killer
Not your mother
Not your father
Not your boy or girl friend
No wife or husband could demand it of you
Not even yourself
Not Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha
Not the Rasta not even God himself
No one can ask of you to choose to kill and assassin

Thus my child
When you read this
Read it carefully
As though this is it
Your liberty-breath
Your humanity on skin
Inside your body mind and soul
Do not debate about politics
Nothing can ask of you to become its dark
No one can ask of you to carry their dark desires translated into corpses and bloods

Remember the tomorrows
Those tomorrows are your past to be made
Do not make them for any one
To form tomb-stone-relics
To form the endless episodes of your fire-burning-nightmares
For those tomorrows will thin into your past
And they will run through your marrow as rivers of fire-knife-cut-glass
And nothing and no one will become a redeeming Jesus for you

Hence when you are told
Serving your country is the highest honour
Think of the murderers and the slaughtered
And run as far and as fast as you could
Make a choice to refuse to waste your life in believing and living in lies
That will chop you every micro length of your time as a living onion
Only this will get your blood and marrow burning your country that you destroyed
No one will come redeeming your body mind or soul
Even though they will tell you you are a toy to obey orders
Even though they will tell you you are just a trained machine to acquire trained ends
No one will ever come redeeming your body mind or soul

Read this my son
Read this my daughter
Read this my child
As though this is the sun in the infinite darkness of this universe
And light a tiny candle of a rose and smile and say: get away from our gardens
Be the breath and bloom of bewildering magnanimity of the dawn
And offer your hands to the lilies and laurels of the laughter of children and elderly
Read this my child
Read this and let it become your bone-marrow-steel
And let it light your ways with a prayer of lights of the seasons of reasons
And rock solid clay forming a coral core as muslin-soft-Beethoven-strung-youth

Go Up

This Thing

After the alien speeches of the conference after all the hellos and good byes
After all the how do you dos and after the niceties of professional etiquettes
After all the smiles landscaping gardens of solid lies and sun dried palms
After all those utterances and all those claps and ovation I still want to go

I need to go to the lake for I have been carrying this thing between my palms
The universe now shattered millions of pieces that was once a glass I hold tight
I hold tight for I do not want it to shatter away here where beautifully dressed
People and their well ironed designer gears, garments, hats, horns and heights

I kept hold as hard as I could so that it could not make any noise, sound or sigh
I kept on walking away on the thorned up path of darkness where laid Stephen
Laurence’s last sighs and the agony-strewn last breath for people were thinking
I was the guy who was stealing the Bank of England or Shakespeare’s manuscript

I thus walked away being accused of taking something that did not belong to me
Yet I carried on walking for I needed to go for I could not keep hold of that thing
Between my palms anymore and I still felt the daggers of all those eyes all those
Faces and all those who were spelling their heritage and their inheritance on my

Poor soul! I wanted to scream out to say something but I was rather in a dire hurry
I carried on walking for I had this thing between my palms and I wanted it not to die
And I could not hold it any longer for it carried on filling the space raging now hard
I offered polite refusal declining to shake hands for I was holding something rather

Subtle and submerged in my palms and I nodded and I back walked and I smiled
That surely was strong enough to cause scars in people’s dictionary of dried dictions
I carried on running now I carried on running now for I could not see that thing dying
Between my palms for it was now raging a torrent of not any but the Red Sea wailing

In the linguistic of silence that could even shatter God’s heaven and it carried on rising
Raging and I carried on running till I reached the lake! The lake that lay ever receiving
I placed my hold of the palms into her water and let this thing dissolve into her spread
And there I sat looking at the spread and I apologised to the lake for the sunset colour

Scream now dissolving into her a shape of a black myth hiding red all now liquidated
Into this nothingness bound colourless spread and I felt the cool kiss of water on the
Battered landscape of my palms and I had this hole a black fire burning like a blackhole
And I now could sit here near the lake baking myself in the heat of a fire that is no bird