If you wanted
you could just walk in,
enter this Bohemian room
with so many flesh tones
it’s almost psychedelic.
Tom twirls a corkscrew curl
of his mixed race girlfriend’s hair
as she talks to the drunk Hindu
playing bongo’s in the corner
and I sit beside him.
At school, Tom was called
‘Doubting Thomas’.
He too thumbed
through philosophy books then
and we can both still
quote them verbatim.
But his finger has felt
the stigmata’s edge.
I love to talk with Tom
to kiss the feet of Jesus
when they hang on his door
like humble prayers
to medicine, or hear
the poetry of the King James
when he reads aloud.
Imrhan, sits under the tricolour,
calm as a lotus flower,
though his Iraq
crumbles like his cigarette’s
trailing tip.
Imrhan; Muslim, gay, Buddhist, Kurd,
his strange accent forms
around slow vowels, like petals,
as he spontaneously composes
a rap song –
the folk music of Generation X –
for Yvonne who sits beside him
and talks of one heated June
when the Orangemen,
scorching as the sun,
marched down Falls Rd,
her road,
she attempted to halt them
but it only ended in a sound
discordant as a keyboard
being chucked downstairs,
her ribs bruising and cracking
beneath their boots.
For me, this world she describes
is as alien as Mars.
And in my mind, I hear
some humanist hymn,
for I idealise these guys
who, though from religion-ruined
countries, continue, soldiers of faith.
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Submission Name: These Friends are Dreams
