We unfocus our eyes, losing depth perception, we’ve done this since we were youngsters. We sit dead still, our concentration thin, six inches ahead. We are holding something important of ourselves outside of ourselves, it is softly ragged. During these trances we skate a continuous present tense, the past becomes duller, less intruding than normal, fewer tumbling ropes of gore. Our futures are a matter of seconds.

*

We never thought of rules as fair or unfair, we just tried to follow them.

*

We are recklessly bold. We are socially inept. We lack impulse control. We are modelled to violence.

*

The weight one body may have in history. Contemporary witness. The hardness inside compressing to unreasonable weight outwith of scale. Something inside that can change through will alone, dropping hard to match an ideology. To act outside of scale, with hope. Skeleton, basic impulse of protest. Militant cherishing. It’s about you, not for you.

*

Tested by their thumps.

*

The red pocked face of a cheap, machine-pressed Victorian house brick. The brick finding its right place only in patterned relation to other bricks, for alone the brick is not a house. What keeps the brick intact, what keeps the house from falling down, are the brick’s three cast holes, not its weakest spot but its strongest. Sustained by mortar, hardened by history.

*

We all watch the News and read the papers here all the time, not for opinion, for information. Funny thing is we know what we’re watching and reading’s not true, for most times we were there and witnessed the provocation, the retreat, the barbed wire ripped shin. The scrake of dawn dismantlement of a red brick terrace house so it’s like an Uncle Remus Play-Kit with half the bits missing. The plum kiss of a rubber bullet on his forehead. The baby being pinched sore by his Mammy for to cry for his Daddy who’s being lifted. Thirteen year-old girls down the town being body searched in makeshift shelters, their Tammy Girl bras being snapped at the back, told by soldiers who are twice, three times their age, to keep their little titties growing for a good chewing one night. Older women being directed, by rifle, to walk under the handwritten sign, SEX STARVED WOMEN THIS WAY. Letters above shops depleting week after week, smashed by stones and bullets, blasted until the shop names don’t mean anything anymore. The decapitated head wrapped in the pink baby blanket and kept in the bath with the frozen Christmas turkey leaning against it because the police won’t let the ambulance through. Cleaning up before a raid so we won’t be disgraced, cleaning up after a raid so we won’t be disgraced. The monstrance winking from the back of the RUC Land Rover, the two priests’ special white and gold vestments for the Corpus Christi parade grubby from them being spread eagled on the road, the youngsters watching don’t know what to do so keep on singing Sweet Heart of Jesus. The Second World War hand grenade that only blows off one foot. The soldiers following you down your street in a Saracen, shining a spotlight on you, telling you they can smell you. Orchestrated power cuts, a full moon. The brown lemonade van stopping coming because it can’t get through the barricades, smashing the empty bottles in the yard so they can’t be used as petrol bombs, mizzle pooling in them, a wee sparrow taking a bath. The dog crucified on the railings across the road and you wondering where the dog come from for nobody round here has no pets. Being shot at from the soldier’s sangar, falling to the ground into a ball to keep yourself safe, crawling home, not telling Mammy and getting shouted at for getting your school socks dirty, watching Blue Peter in tears. A clod of wet skin with a Celtic cross brooch sunk into it on the pavement outside the paper shop on Sunday morning, stepping over it. Flimsy corrugated iron peacelines are good amplifiers for the riot squad’s batons. Blatter and scatter. Praying for a breezeblock wall. What for? To hide behind. The provocation, the retreat, the barbed wire ripped shin, and we keep on watching. All of us, all of us across Belfast, in every street, in every house, all of us, all of us watching in silence.