Borders Seem to Like Me

I sit in Amsterdam  

Write to Boris  

Take a coffee  

Say out loud  

‘illegals are people without paper’  

And ‘legals are like me with.’  

 

The border and I get on 

Because esteemed ministers  

I don’t know personally  

Decided Swansea sounds a better  

Place of origin than  

Tripoli, Addis Ababa, Kabul.  

 

Because all I need do is rock up,  

Student I.D. in hand  

(I pay lower fees; borders seem to like me) 

Join a queue of curious faces  

Pick up a BSN number  

(All these acronyms/but then again 

If I were a refugee, I would know more -  

I told you the border likes me).  

 

Were I to be teargassed by the police in a foreigner’s state  

For sleeping by the road to England in a tent  

My god you would know about it.  

The border would tell you.  

We play Chinese whispers together.  

 

If someone left me to drown in the sea,  

Watched from a drone,  

If a judge sentenced me to indeterminate days in a festering detention camp,  

Put me on a plane to a country where suicide bombs drop in tempo with  

Departing American bombs,  

The plane I’d arrive in blood 

 

Covered.  

No.  

The border wouldn’t have that.  

 

Because Abertawe sits at the teeth of the Channel that dragged slaves 

To make a land rich.  

And on this soil, I entered the world.  

I inherited amorphousness. I know how to take. 

 

Borders seem to like me.