encircled by, not the star called the snake-tamer, but by silwanic
pools, by Reuven Rivlin and Jeremiah, trapped in Anathoth
without a permit, what birds, sky prisons, walking hardscrabble for
miles to get to, chained into surveilled nooks,
I transform into a
dog or a camel as if by black magic,
I a father, me a

son of culpa, the scenario Israel needs to protect itself from,
listening dusts, the reports that frankly don’t give a dam, the miles
and miles of handwriting explain away with mene menes the good
bad and ugly of the cowboy wall that out-herods herod etc.
my shadow is not an imal an imal, radio signals to snipe

Jerusalem shall be called the… er… city of truth, sayeth Zecheriah,
two-between, every voice bugged by its own ear, the voices go on,
ever for, eerie gauntlets and corridors widen into disposed turfs,
engineering dances about us satanically
but we are too small too many to be one opposing force,
infantilised, Americans

have many ideas about this city, mill ideas, book ideas,
life ideas, dust ideas, air ideas, shit ideas, red is something we don’t wish to
see right now,
sun-bars, an angel with red and white wings is holding an arrow
to the back of a cat’s head, Uri Ariel, Kerry and the EU, literally
columns of ink
drying in sun, making history

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Niall McDevitt is the author of three collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Por- terloo (International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits, Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He is also known for his psychogeographical, psychohistorical walks such as The Wil- liam Blake Walk, An Arthur Rimbaud Drift, A Chaucer London Pilgrimage, The Kensington Modernists, and many others. As art-activist he has campaigned to save the Rimbaud-Ver- laine house in Mornington Crescent, and against overdevelopment of sites near Blake’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields. In 2016, he performed his poetry in Iraq at the Babylon Festival. He blogs at poetopography.wordpress.com