Settlement
We exist the death-in-life
of every day and every day
under the scorching immediacy
of hopelessness; bent down,
immobile beneath a sun’s
gaze radiating fixed futility.
We walk the aimless paths
around the concrete prison walls
of every day and every day;
the rifles pointed; the check-points
and the ritual humiliations: the
paths that describe a circling
return to the beginning, as day
and night, themselves, become
a circle.
We breathe in the weariness
of every day and every day
in a world where borders
shrink by metres between an
eye-blink and another bulldozed
boundary. We sweat the
hopeless anger of bricks thrown
against tanks; of bullets returned
against frustration; forced
into the rigid tattoos of the
bestial; becoming animal in
response to the eyes of those who
hold the stick.
We exist the death-in-life
of every day and every day
under sanctimony and the
wishes of invisibility from the
tongues of land diplomacy. We
live solely to be admonished
for our sin of living; to be
punished for the crime of our own
inability to disappear. We exist
the death-in-life that is a
people’s purgatory; the awareness
of solely being a discomfort to
pragmatic stage politics: an
offence to the sensibilities
of the world.
