The hunger striker sings his death

This is my body my pale body my hairy body

my stinking body

my body with its moles and leaks

my body with its scars and sores and sweats my body with its itches and its aches

my longing body my weeping body my body whipped

my body bruised my body crushed my spat on body my pissed on body

my punched and kicked and electrocuted body my shivering starving body in a cell

Surrounded by bars and floodlights and grilles watchtowers and gates and electronic locks walls inside walls inside walls inside walls

corners where light is slung like a swift axe throw shadows pregnant with nooses and saws

barbed wire puzzles, riddles of broken glass

snares of bayonets, mazes of steel pincers and claws

guarded by needles in pipes arrows in clocks and eight-legged poisonous cameras

by mikes attached to Beetles

by double-shifting psychopaths and cannibals drunken teenage marksmen on the roofs german shepherds laced with speed

stallions with serrated hooves

besieged by self reloading magazines rapid fire repeating headlines

morning artillery and main evening shells battalions of experts in think thanks

heroic newscasters riding on elephants khaki battalions of correspondents

the black watchers of Reuters and the BBC

stormed by blowtorches, fists and boots by electric wires and twine and LSD

by white noise and burning cigarette butts by a black hole pointed at my mother’s head by great white sharks circling my Dad

by a mushroom cloud painted over my wife by tidal waves aimed at my kids

here is my body

my famished and shrivelling body

where I am making my last and unbreakable stand where slowly, by the ebbing minute

by the shrinking hour

by the days pouring sand in the canyon of my mouth by the days piling silt in the river of my mouth

by the days spilling lava in the valley of my mouth I am lightening

I am losing gravity

I am loosening the ballast of my flesh

I am ungluing myself from the spools of my eyes and untying the knots of my hearing and touch and slipping the hooks of my taste and my smell I am winding out of pain’s net

I am winding out of the shrouding of sense

and I am going down to the very core of myself to be safer from their tortures

than at the centre of a sun

safer than a cave in an ocean trench safer than ice in mountain’s heart

and there beyond the blind horizon of events in a prophet’s cell

in a house of pure light

I am giving birth to my invincible death.