A Handshake
by Reins
What is a metaphor but a measure for guilt?
What is a memory but a searchlight
Over the places that hurt?
What is a life but a search?
Black and white and white
On black and white which is to say
There’s a hallway inside my head tonight
And a table in a kitchen beneath a solitary light.
What was his name? I can see his face now so clearly.
Pouring hot soup into a plastic bowl in my hand like a waiter.
He smiles like Madonna. Yeah, the singer, Madonna.
His laugh is contagious. A struck match. His laugh is a madness
A madness I wish I could catch. When he speaks
He speaks of the strip and his wife and his kids
As if his whisper were oxygen to tinder to ember
To flame. I was in awe of his stature. A shadow he said
Grows best by the fire. He smiles like Madonna,
Which is to say black space punctuates white teeth.
Black and white and white on black and white
Which is to say when he excites his breath,
His spit glitters the place. Constellations the dark spaces
That light refuses self-determination. Black and white
And white on black and white like white cotton and black lace,
Crosshatched in the keffiyeh he would fold around my shoulders
Later, like a handshake he said. Like olive leaves, like barbed wire,
Like fishnets, like waves. How careless of me to let it fall
From my neck in no other struggle but the business of living.
How careless I’ve been with everything I’ve been given.
What was his name? What did he do for a living?
What skills were required off him that side of the border.
I’ve heard it’s impossible to cross the blockade
These days. It’s been harder to forget that I’ve forgotten
More often in the ricochet of pixel rays, and bomb blasts.
Sniper bullets grazing my wine glass.
Quadcopters hover over my TV dinner. When F16s circle
My waistline, I close the laptop and clear the plates
For the evening. The next day when it’s time for work
A drone buzzes above me in the street, uses AI
To identify the barista smirking cause she wasn’t really ill
It was just a hangover. Twisting her cling-filmed arm
To reveal her new tattoo. Red and green and white
And black and red and green. I turn to leave and then bang
A white flash and I’m scared to look round, in case of spilt coffee
And parts of bodies. I work with my head down for the rest
Of the day in a windowless room. I pass the hospital
On the way home but instead of the hospital, there is a hole
In the ground like an ancient tooth pulled from its roots
In the earth and I think of the gap in his grin again.
I look back at the streets now a bloody mouthful of teeth.
Red and black and white on black and red no green.
I think of that scarf he gave me, that pattern of black lace
Like olive leaves, like sea waves, like barbed wire,
Like a handshake. And then I wake and everything is in its place.
And everyone I love is safe and it returns to me at last
Because it never should have left. His name was Ali
And he was a doctor. With everything that means
Now in Gaza. Which is to say murdered.
Which is to say martyred.
A giant against empire.
Reins is a singer-songwriter, producer, and poet based in Brighton, UK. He’s just a working class Welsh boy waiting to be found out. You can find him on Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, and Substack.
Image Credit: there is an angel waiting for you in the lobby (2024) by Natasha Zinos
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