Deportee Boys
Brushed as violent & dangerous,
Murderers, drug dealers & rapists.
Now he must leave after serving
his sentence, driving off from the police
with no license or insurance.
Call him stupid, but when he was six,
his father flew him over &
called London home. Now at 34,
callously dipped; ripped apart from
everything but himself he owns.
They bashed down the windows and door.
Dawn raid shocked him as he spooned
his English lady. Inseparable,
they made a home together. The
warrant woke up the fresh baby.
“What’s your name? Get your clothes on.
We’d like a word.” Digital
fingerprints, they whisked him away.
Detained him in Morton Hall.
“It’s not a prison but a removal center,”
they say.
Punished twice under lock & key.
“Don’t worry,” his lawyer emphatically
enthused. “I’m going to fight. I shall
stop that flight. This is your home.
Your human rights.”
But shocked when a squad
appeared at dawn. All he possessed
were the clothes on his back.
Shoved into the meat wagon,
the cage slammed shut. The final
solution: Doncaster Airport.
Hemmed in by six officers
on a chartered flight across the ocean.
All he remembers of the island
is brushing his teeth in a yard
in downtown Kingston. A cock crowed,
and a burnt sun rose, he thought.
An extraordinary rendition
rippling, he starts again, thousands
of miles from where he calls
home. Here, he has no family
or friends. The locals can’t
understand his accent.
“I will undertake positive action.
But who will employ a deportee
who had his chance in the land
of hope and glory and fucked it?”
He fears if his whereabouts be
known, his status will attract
unknown criminals, so he stays
in a secret location,
paranoid, not venturing
far outside the safe house.
Sitting on the rear porch
in the rural countryside, he
consistently cries.
It grows dark early in this hemisphere,
every evening his daughter
video calls him asking –
“Daddy, where are you?
Are you coming home?
Your holiday is taking long.
Don’t you miss me, daddy?”
Hemmed in by six officers
on a chartered flight across the ocean.
All he remembers of the island
is brushing his teeth in a yard
in downtown Kingston. A cock crowed,
and a burnt sun rose, he thought.
An extraordinary rendition
rippling, he starts again, thousands
of miles from where he calls
home. Here, he has no family
or friends. The locals can’t
understand his accent.
“I will undertake positive action.
But who will employ a deportee
who had his chance in the land
of hope and glory and fucked it?”
He fears if his whereabouts be
known, his status will attract
unknown criminals, so he stays
in a secret location,
paranoid, not venturing
far outside the safe house.
Sitting on the rear porch
in the rural countryside, he
consistently cries.
It grows dark early in this hemisphere,
every evening his daughter
video calls him asking –
“Daddy, where are you?
Are you coming home?
Your holiday is taking long.
Don’t you miss me, daddy?”