As they dragged me toward the Land Rover I broke free and I floated up with my arms raised into the air, God’s Own Boys are the figures rising up, the umbilical to the throat is our bright connection, and the vans, and the ambulances, down below, are humbled, and the military vehicles spread out across Jamaica Street in the snow, are humbled, and the soldiers, are huddled, in groups, their guns aimed at the coffins, arrayed all around them, coffins arrayed, around the ways, and illuminated, by the lights of ambulances, on this borderline, beneath the frosted roofs of the old Ardoyne, gathered, as witnesses, in memory, poor bastards, in memory, now, forever, as I hovered above the rooftops of the Ardoyne and I cast my light down, on the imprisoned, and as the three figures moved to open the Land Rover door, I let myself go, a balloon with the light inside of me is a poor cast for a body, as I let go of the golden light inside of me, and let it come down

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.