Palestinian child arrested by Israeli soldiers
By James O’Brien
You don’t have to die to be dead,
The blueprints are a shroud dripping with glee,
Watch enough murder corpses cops tell you,
It accretes until the boundary layer surfs,
A tidal wave of blood soaked to the ubiquitous rubble.
There is no aftermath and no grandiosity of empire,
There is simply dust and the donated rags,
Shredded in the blast of stasis eternity.
I plant apple pips in the cigarette burns,
Tent shelters on my Persian rug,
To watch them be born and die,
Beyond that span of dehydration, neglect,
And the constant trampling of removal
Then burning, abjuring the toxicity of blank.
A view from Al-Shifa and the aid ‘distribution’ points,
As the lifeless anoxic IDF man adjusts his sight,
To a child’s bollocks to vary the range finder shot.
A direct hit of immediate death, trauma or bleed out,
That lead intrusion to into soft, young flesh,
Unprotected flesh betrayed, goaded,
Snell! Snell! To that insecure space of devastation.
There’s no talcum powder for the spavined child,
Left dying, hard-ridden, an IDF shot of celebration.
The child riddled with ordinance as well as hunger.
Target practice for those pariah ghouls,
As they destroy that which they can’t hold,
Do it, don’t do it, you will regret.
That was Monday, fucking Monday.
Tuesday’s child is full of grace, a bullet to the face,
The head, in microcosm as devastated shattered bone,
Into brain, into a complete circumference,
A complete insatiability of the IDF’s perversity.
Another child, as they dredge the distribution point,
A moving target in the infinitesimal,
The scale of torso, proud locus of resistance,
Obliterated to mush like your snide blandishments.
A bullet to the chest, a lone doctor tally’s the pattern,
Rinse it down to your custom and practices,
This is your practice, is this how you accrue honour,
As you prepare for your anti-christ barbarism of the ‘final push’,
This is your useless violence, this is your target practice.
Beyond the Nazi succubus where are your poisoned wombs?
A pariah state of aggrandisement so beyond the Pale,
A landscape of over, it turns sour, black milk of shame.
Suffering as a jeer entertainment, victimhood an aspiring agenda,
No rope there as you capitalised on suffering,
Weaving Nabka to a destroyed child’s entrails,
Prophet’s read viscera citing Gazan gore,
As you maintain a dungeon on gaping wounds
Filtrates of light run as sitting ducks to the Penal Colony,
Practice obliteration in that lawless grave.
Everywhere leads somewhere for you IDF man,
You will stand ramrod straight in front of the tribunal,
You will be judged by your actions as the ground subsides.
Roiling spirits and the crushed bones of children,
A steady surface does not make,
You will collapse in shame and blame the innocent dead.
