By the mouth of the river - poem 3 (Home)

The vague brave and the formless protectors are its ancestors.
Through its veins runs blood of Kings and Curraghs.
Blood that rose up and the blood that forced it down.
It is alien.
It is not reconciled with its populace.

I should be willingly forlorn and pale,
Almost certainly obscured all of the time.
Gracing my way across the sky, celestial.
I would shine upon whomsoever I pleased.
I would bleed light over Belfast, spill my guts.

It is in this world that I am condemned.
The world where Harland & Wolff reaches up to my sky.
Where Windsor Park threatens to encapsulate the anger,
To crumble, its walls billowing funeral shrouds, as its roots are rotten,
But there is to be no revolution in Dogshit Terrace.

The veins have started to flow again, the blood absorbed into the living city,
Ann Street bustles, whilst the Ormeau Road, Graham’s bookies and the Hatfield Wear their scars proudly. From the chest poke faces, smiling through the cracks.
Intruders in the living world, either martyrs or balaclavas,
Hiding truth, the disappeared, love, money, politics and humanity.

Belfast falls again with a bang, breaking its building bones
It is but a wanderer, searching for enlightenment underneath a forlorn moon,
Worn out by constant questioning, dry of its innocent blood.
Blood which is recycled, to be spilt again, for the truth the moon held,
The very truth it leaked onto the earth.

The blind city sits beneath the flood of light,
3000 used up watts, flat silhouettes of the moon’s truth.
To look up is to ignore the past, to seek the answer above, not below.
Belfast looks to the red vein flow of the Lagan. To be in the depths would be pleasure.
To sink without a fight would be clean, to take away this pain in its chest.

The deaf city kneels in prayer to a single god, tinitus ringing in its ears.
Its numb mouth scrapes at the pavement as it rejects TV sets,
False words bleeding from its throat, it rids itself of its stomach,
The city will die, but it still wants to float, all it needs is a strong arm,
Something to drag it out and beat the frozen water from its lungs.

It will strangle itself on the life ring,
The rope will pull its arms out,
The life boat forces the Lagan down its throat,
It will drag the divers down,
And sink happily, forever.