upon the snowey streets, faye doon,

soft raine, ye pome,

a castes downe aye the pale lighte

upon the peoples

aneath me

as it begins to rain, warm golden tears, raining down, on both sides, as they faced off, as Christmas, of 1980, is long to reign over us, until there was nothing left inside of me, and I crumpled, like a balloon, and I floated back to earth where they hid me in the back of a Land Rover that sped off, in the rain and the snow, because it was still raining, and it was raining forever, I told myself, because I knew what I had started would never stop, because I was aware of being left with one thing, one thing that was inside me, one thing that they could never wipe out themselves, one thing that I realised in that moment was my own to insult and to destroy and to pass through. Then they took me to The Dead Zone: The Place Of Endless Echoes, which is where it all began.

*

I come in during the period where the first hunger strike was coming to an end and the second about to begin, see The Blanketmen what looked like Jayzus, naked, but for a grey or a brown blanket, stood there in their own excrement, young men with the long hair hanging down, brave boys.

I was mirror-searched on my first day, which means being held spread-eagled over a mirror while thick fingers penetrate your orifices. They pulled my hair and kicked me around the room and put their fists in my mouth but when I arrived on my block a shout went up. New man on the block! And the lags around me cheered and clapped and they made me feel less afraid. And I sang what my place was, in Ireland, sang the Ardoyne into the pipes and down into the toilet bowl, and felt Ireland all around us, as an echoes, as an echoes, is everything.

In The Maze you must learn to read an echoes. The jangle of keys, the unlocking of a wing, the approach of a guard, the distant sound of a beating or the cries of a crucifixion above a mirror, is as echoes, now, is as lagging ghosts. At mass there were priests who believed that Christ Jayzus could heal the sick, that we could cast off our crutches and walk into Jayzus Himself, he tells us, one Sunday morning, when he announced that Christ Jayzus was there in The Maze beside us, in the very room where we stood, that He had come down to greet us, and Christ but He must have had a strong stomach because nobody was washing, nobody was cutting their hair, and we’re all stood there, like all of His sons, come back to Him, all of His Christs, stretching back till forever, which is two thousand year since the beginning of the world, says the voice of Christ Jayzus, as a priest, in H3.