Hound of Ulster

A poem by DaDa x NSDF company-member, David Longworth

You wake
Reborn
A rebirth of a rebirth of a rebirth
in a long line of those Ulster rejects, resisting
on the battlefield of the DWP
claiming some small space of PIP
through the bog of British bureaucracy
You wade, failing at the enemies that assail you
with the knowledge, ever present;
They are trying to kill you.
They are trying to kill you with their resentment
their passive aggressive placitudes,
with their sheer lack of access
with their administrative siege warfare, with
their apathy,
killing you with the words:

Fine, but it’s so much work

When the only one who has to work is you,
in the labour of living,
living with the system that disables you (racialises you, genders you…)
that makes it a labour.
Because you were born as one fighting the world,
Your body was birthed in a torque
or else,
Your head lives in the raging moment of the warp-spasm
Agus leagann sé tú ag an riastrad seo (And sets you at this riastrad)
But that’s fine,
because this is just you at your strongest.

And you are angry.
So angry
So angry your sight refuses to see
Your blindness refuses to strain, to discriminate
between the kind and the cruel
of all who refuse to enable you.
You scream without sounds
You move with no motions
You fight with no violence,
except that which you endure.
You
will go on to do
Great and terrible things
But you won’t live long.
That is the trade we make living in the moment of this prophecy.
For the greatest revolutionary is
They who struggle
at the Zero point.
Burn your anger like the heat of a fever
Bulge, and contort and break
And become grotesque in your indignancy
Tearing through the forests of the system
pulping the legions of paperwork
Upon your chariot or your own two feet.

Go, Hound of Ulster,
And bear forth
the brutal core of a disabled courage.