“This is brave writing which uses metaphor evocatively and doesn’t shy away from making the reader uncomfortable.” Vicky Spratt, author, housing correspondent at The i, and Orwell Youth Prize 2024 judge
You are crashing, seething, breathing,
and I am an infant at your feet.
Those black vein pipes,
pumping oil, sluggish, in your veins.
I am an island child, a wild child,
I grew up in the beat of waves against the shore.
A quiet child, a pacified child,
of blood-red morals and open-mouth horrors.
I am growing into this anger, into my white-hot, unscaled skin.
Those clawing-finger nets gutting your belly,
stomach-acid sand hurled up the gulley of your throat,
the boats that bob the water outside my house,
the plastic you spit, groaning, onto shore.
I am scanning the cliffs for a culprit, a criminal.
Discard each neon figure, the deck-scrubbing, winch-heaving dutifuls.
I am searching the treelines and skylines, the roads and rivers,
yet the blame bleeds forth like an ink-spill stain,
into a city goer, a stranger, a number on a board.
He stands there, a paper-money man in shoes of brown leather,
never having seen the boat that fills his pocket.
I think, I could kill him,
(I could, I could)
He is only flesh. He is not the metal arm that trawls the seabed,
nor the wires that hack apart my sky,
nor the bleached-white bones parcelled up in black seaweed.
Because the rigging is tall but I could climb it,
and the engine is small but I would find it.
I would do it. He has, already.
He of the heavy pocket, him who never sinks.
This was our home first- me and you, a rolling ocean of silver-blue.
It’ll be our home after,
when you crawl to my door,
as the streets are pumped dry and cliffs set in concrete,
still gulping down endless bottle caps and broken tyres,
-silver cans and toothpaste tubes-
-lost left shoes and soy sauce packets-
-polystyrene and polyvinyl and polyethylene-
He will not get down on his knees and make a prayer of those soft hands.
He will be beyond, above, full and sated with new prospect.
For his home is where the money grows,
and nothing lives in that wake.