White Face, Foreign Hands has won First Prize in the Workplace Racism category of the 2025 Black in White Poetry Competition. Drawn from experiences working in NHS hospitals, it explores racism, exceptionalism, and the lingering legacy of colonialism.
Triage
Pain arrives like live wire and verdict. My body locks, spasms, burns, while advice accumulates: self-manage, be positive, exercise. I pace, growl, and calculate risk, knowing the system calls suffering background noise. Triage becomes character assessment.
ICE
In the shadow of recent ICE operations and shootings in Minneapolis, this poem captures the tension, the pause that haunts everyday movement. Uncertainty becomes its own punishment and always, always the question: who’s next?
Mercy Is Not Sleeping
A poetic reflection on a healthcare worker's take on pain, fear, and fractured sleep. Witnessing others at their worst, and living with Long Covid, he finds an uncomfortable truth: shallow sleep spares him dreams. Sometimes, exhaustion offers a narrow, unsentimental mercy.
Not Nice, On Purpose
A poem about intentional kindness in healthcare: not niceness, not politeness, not placation, but staying present when fear, pain, and anger collide. Kindness as deliberate, assertive, grounded practice, not personality.
Global Risk Assessment
A poem about impulse mistaken for power, and what happens when the world is forced to recalibrate around one unstable voice. This is not ideology. It is capacity, consequence, and the shared blast radius of failed restraint.