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anthony anaxagorou – there i was lyrics

[verse 1]
i walked past it all, past the simple house i first lived in when my fathers tantrums raised my mothers poor reticence
where his temper quickly raised two boys with raised fists
who later understood what it meant when someone bigger raised their fist to them

[verse 2]
at school, in the playground a nose would break, the crowd cheering because the softer boy with battered dreams under his eyes would yell, as the repeating fists of the other boy would land with all the weight of his stony upbringing

[verse 3]
i stood wretched, with each break of bone, each drumming stump, knowing that he and i were secretly related by this violence, by the paternal fists that taught us both to touch, because on the day he put my surname into his mouth he smirked, pimping the vowels and raping the consonants, until i summoned my fathers fist, closed my eyes, begging my courage to stay with me, as if it were the last friend who would decide not to run years later, when a group of racists would chase us into the gutter of our own fear
letting myself fall back in love with the family that had raised us both i gave him my finest lesson, rolling on that hard ground our shirts ripping, a uniform of blood schooling us in the same classroom of brutality
skin, on skin, my warm olive against his cold white, the dying history of my split name up against the imperial stampede of his, so there we were, fighting back against the same men who were bigger than us in size but smaller than us in heart, men who we wanted so much to be like, but who left us with nothing but the drilling impression of fists to grow into, to grow into intrepid teenagers with clothes too big and skin too brown

[verse 4]
a group of boys moving towards us, older, stronger, their heads shaved cleaner, their eyes having stolen to hold prisoner all the blue from the summer sky
with a pace ignited by adrenalin, and a hate they wouldn’t live long enough to understand
my friends running, scattering like fragments of a wish that gets stuffed down the barrel of a gun and then exploded into a dead heart, everyone running like horses that n0body will ever bet on, all accept my one friend, the one who knew what a closed fist felt like when it fell like a corrupt hammer of judgement on a little boys chest, we both stayed to feel our fathers again
and with all our crumbling bravery those boys beat us black and made us the blue in their eyes, the same blue that could sink waves and drown sharks, only by now, everything had stopped hurting, even when we begged them to stop, because all we really wanted to do was scream out and say ‘can’t you see, we’re f+++ing the same s+++
made from the same miserable stock
this is our language, this is our life
our fathers knew each other, our fathers were each other

[verse 5]
so there i was in a hospital ward being put back together, when my girlfriend came in to sit beside me staring into my face just so that i could count the stitches in those wet diamonds that made value of her eyes

[verse 6]
my friend was ok. his father was coming to visit
i nodded my head. everything had survived to die again
the following day, a nurse came in talking about a racial assault. she was nigerian, and in the context of everything that had just happened, so was i
‘racism’, i said, ‘is taught to us, because the only colours children ever hate are greens’
we both laughed, but despite my broken bones and fractured face i still thought her smile hurt more than mine
‘everyone will be black for one moment in their life’, she said. just be thankful it’s only for a moment
walking out the ward on she went, heading to mend a million more lives that will never be her own
[verse 7]
so there i was, years later in a school teaching poetry, the class packing up their work, with one boy staying behind, the same boy who through+out the term hadn’t said a single word because his accent was too fresh. things didn’t sound right when he said them. all the words he had ever learnt had only come to let him down

[verse 8]
he approached my desk with a plain sheet of paper. catching sight of his hands i saw that his knuckles were split, bulging with a raw purple like the fruit that grows from the soil of a graveyard, or a war zone
i remarked that the page was blank
he nodded saying ‘i know sir, but so are the best metaphors, and that special poetry that only fists can heal.’

- anthony anaxagorou lyrics

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