History is written by those who win and those who dominate.

Edward Said

Blessed by an unholy curiosity

To reach out to all that is mortal, dies;

The pungent smell of hot tar sends me back

To summer days spent wending my time away

As dandelions parodied the gaudy sun

Stones were reserved for having fun by skimming water.

In the dark church heavy incense melds

With the body odour of the priest

Sweating for his immortal soul

Did I dream the frozen moment when I pushed at the heavy door

And stared myopically down the nave towards the altar,

Admiring the immutable calm of the white burning candles,

Not seeing the conscious act of sacrilege taking place on the altar?

Mummified unwindings of a past that could not last

Like a dark, tepid river, fear begins to snake through the empty spaces

Where my veins should be deep inside of me

Where all the souls of all the lost girls and boys coagulate 

To stretch the nothingness of not-knowing way past infinity

The unguent messes of the priest's eyes

Close in unctuous supplication

But no-body listens to the wind

Though the insensibility of stones is a staging post

On the never-ending road to unfenced existence.

Where every line of badly drawn flesh is a labyrinth

Of a life lived apart from the breeding  

Of many well-scrubbed killers

A line of Brutus’s on the Ides of March

Dilemmas create an overweening uncertainty

Go ahead and allocate a fist full of $100 bills

To an orphanage with a uniform dress code

White robes won't do it; burkas don’t do the trick,

Blood drawn by air strikes might

In this off-shoot of the industrial-military complex:

Boys throwing stones at tanks in occupied Palestine,

Had all been loved by girls and women, 

Suffice it to say a ‘humanitarian-medical’ approach

Has little impact on the killer-regimes.

Men live for a love and a bed and a scrub,

Unlike the young scribes, who make the flesh crawl; 

By staying alive.

The best mild decades of the 1920s and 1950s, are recalled fondly

In the mainstream media as times of dancing and singing,

While the monsters of European-American his-story

Make killers-tolls on the produce of the small farmers of Africa

For politics is a dirty, greedy business,

That knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing:

Like the Yemini children regularly blown to bits on our HD screens