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... Continue reading
Mass picket in Birmingham, with Jeremy Corbyn. Photo: James O’Brien By James O’Brien This was more like it in the brittle ether of the works yard,I could... Continue reading
Mass starvation in Gaza. Image courtesy of Al Jazeera By James O’Brien Is this your damn mouth?The horror faces abide,By horror time in Nazi abysses,Of jaundiced apartheid... Continue reading
Photo courtesy of the Morning Star by James O’Brien There’s always a different time to be born,It was just our chance to be born then.When the world... Continue reading
The rats of Birmingham love the hollowed-out places,They rumble in bin bags waiting to rupture,Spilling ordure over the backs of scabs outsourcing the deal.The rats abandoned the... Continue reading
Self-portrait with Hand on Brow – Kathe Kollwitz by James O’Brien Even after all, the span was only yesterday,That yesterday of horrors, where everyone slipped away.I felt... Continue reading
Orgreave after Guernica, by Bob Olley I wouldn’t go back I should have but I couldn’t.It wasn’t an end but a beginning.At Nantgarw the black Taff swelled... Continue reading
A thug entity, paralysed in starch graves,Peace will come as you wound the land,The price of an un-healing vanity.Those fissures after extraction voided,Take us to that hole,... Continue reading
Flensing whales at a whaling station, Akutan, Alaska, ca 1915 The dreaded rooms of surrendered disarticulation,The body, de-fleshed, deracinated now, eying the walls.Where the exhaled tobacco creates... Continue reading
by James O’Brien The low loaders were busy,Around the time of ceasefire.Shifting carnage machines,To follow a map to your Hell.There’s a mad lady over there,Who has the... Continue reading