Dream2

My Father hits my sister in an alternative Christmas present
My town re imagined, re mapped
The drama occurs off screen
And I inhabit the aftermath
A sibling conspicuous by her absence
And a parent puffed up despicable with self righteous excuses
Another dream with violent passages
Echoing the realities suppressed
Unbounded in the dead night heat
However aloof once thinks one may be from certain subject matter
However detached or cold
Something must seep through into one's loam foundations and poison the water supply
Yesterday I reflected onto my elder, and vice versa
Whilst the fire water scoured the inside of my head
The sex sweated out my angst and fear and nurtured new buds but that was all conscious
And when I wriggle in mosquito night Something surfaces
And familial guilt that refuses to die but instead sits lurking beneath the radar, Strikes with a vengeance,a part of me as much, if not more
Than any of this present reality
I'm taking responsibility for my happiness
but to the untrained eye that might seem similar to taking the piss
Waking or not, I'm learning lessons
Reflecting on the heart pounding horrors before
And mint tinged night in a second rate discotheque
Green European beers and barbed revelations of what I already knew but couldn't embrace as ours
We're thrown into a world but we're not alone
We carry fragile umbilical connections through which love flows
Connections that strain and sometimes snap when fists are raised and blood flows
Rushing
A flush comes right now
In retrospective empathy and shame
No answer will come from writing this
No forgiveness or resolution
But no hurt will grow either
Isn't that a beautiful numb dead end?

For Reinaldo Arenas

To dance with lethal potential
Like a bare chested capoeirista
Is that not true poetry?

Sat behind every chain store desk
Ergonomically incorrect
Lurks that spirit
Hiding behind the tired eyes of every
Faceless ballpoint bureaucrat

Spreadsheets keep the lights on
And the spirit encased
Equated
to material values
less than the price of one bulb
Discarded in the corner like an artist in solitary confinement
Smeared in their own faeces
Unable to dream
mutilated for performing the most natural of acts
to dissent

If a holy war is a conversation with god
Then the conversation must always be an argument
A single scribbled line on smuggled toilet paper holds more honour, humanity, divinity
Than a million martyred killers

So which prison should one choose?
Or is this a choice at all?
Divinity and Agency are not renowned as easy bedfellows
Perhaps the sole moment of recognition
Will come when you are already dancing, starving in the dark