FIRING SQUAD

Kevin Barry Dos-
toyevsky, Killmainhem
gaol, semonefsky

Three rebels one mind
A firing squad cant kill-
punishment and crime

Heres to you padriag
Mac Piarais, your poems
took my breath away.

LONDON 1977, I THINK THEREFORE I AM!

In 2005 I  took a massive stroke that 
supposedly erased my long term 
memory but lately my memory has 
started to filter back through me.  

Last week I remembered watching
a silly film, Smokey and the bandit. 
You might think this is not a big deal 
but since then I’ve been trying to 
squeeze out this memory.

Sixteen years old, I beat my father 
and ran away from home for third 
or fourth time, I loved my mother 
but hated my father. 

In London I was working in an old mill 
house as a metal polisher just of Hackney  
downs, beside the common,   common   
as muck, thats where the money is.
 We collected old rags to wipe away 
the grease left by the abrasive polisher 
lathe like contraption. 

I don’t know who’s idea it was to dress me
as a prostitute with a newspaper with a hole 
cut so not to see my face. I must say I looked 
the part with tights and a skirt. People were 
stopping and pointing up at the mill at my legs 
wide open to the street, the boys and I were 
in stitches, laughing.

Not everything in London was such a laugh, 
I hated the violence. I ran away from my father
and Northern Ireland to escape the brutality 
but I walked straight into this. The gangs 
of punks, skinheads, Teds, Soul Boys 
and the Reggae troops were out in force,
a new-wave. 

Violence was a part of going out and being young 
but I learned to hate England and yet I was born there.
I recall a house party in Cheswick me and my cousin
David Shields, that night he lived up to his name 
he really was my shield, my brother that night him 
and my unknown friend who worked the stalls 
of the markets. We bought a carry-out left it at the 
makeshift bar and sat around listening to Jamming 
by Bob Marley, Jamming by Bob Marley was everywhere.

The guy with the eyes for me  squeezed the can 
of beerin my hand and said you Irish bastard 
I’m gonna have you outside. This was the story 
of my life, who’s that big Cunt in the corner 
was my nickname, an Englishman in Ireland 
a paddy in England. I didn’t know which way 
to turn. I was a bit of a punk back then an 
Englishman with a Belfast accent sporting 
a ripped boating jacket an anarchist who 
was going to get his head kicked in.

The fight was like a duel but this was common 
on the common at the start I held my own then 
suddenly there was three or four beating me, 
all I could do was roll into a ball and take it, 
then I heard one say throw him off the railway bridge. 
This really was up on the railway bridge at midnight, 
‘felt down the tube station at midnight’, played in my 
head like a lynching. ‘Strange fruit hanging from 
the poplar tree’, I was just a cliché in a song.

 The gang dragged me to the bridge, a van pulled up 
and out came my cousin with iron bars for a stall  
and a friend beating them away throwing me 
in the back and drove off through the streets 
of London thinking every car was following us. 

One day I was beat unconscious and threw in a skip 
beat to a pulp by skinheads a ted with planks of wood, 
the violence was getting out of hand.I was beginning 
to hate the place, turning me into them a thug.

 One night after midnight on a bus from Shore-ditch 
disco pub I heard the rhetoric of a black man spout 
a piss-take of the National Front and the top floor 
of the bus believed it, anything was possible 
in London nineteen seventy seven, we laughed
all the way home.

 My cousin Colin’s head was put through a plain 
glass window because he was dancing to fast  
and I smashed a fruit bowl over the guys head 
but he just came back for more.He was built 
like a brick shit house and the cliché doesn’t 
do him justice. They dragged us out of the party 
lined us up and beat us with dustbin lids for boxing 
gloves a guy seen this and was disgusted he drove 
up to the kerb while they were refueling on another 
drink, get in he said and a car chased us through 
London that night we couldn’t go home so we slept 
on a garage roof.

 My time in London was a city sickness but I could 
see no way out, my father was a republican who knew 
nothing but violence and jail time, so, I became the thug 
London wanted  me to be. We planned on robbing a shoe 
factory so we had the shoes fenced and sold before the job
we broke in through a cemetery at the back and dropped in through a sky light. The younger guys were watching 
at the traffic lights so he waved us on and four or five 
crossed the road but a cop car was stopped at the traffic lights.

 The boxes were discarded but I held on and run, the cop car mounted the kerb and I threw the box over my head ran onto the road and slid under a parked car, the cop car stopped one got out and crossed the road on his way back to the car the curve and his flashlight on the road revealed me under the car. For a weekend they beat me and asked for my name and date of birth, I said my parents had a weak heart so I would not tell them. I was taken to court in one of those criminal cubicle vans, I was really now a fully fledged criminal, fined and deported back to Ireland back to my fathers republican bullshit, my mother really was my  savior.