Tag Archives: anti-war

WHAT A WAR IT WAS

WHAT A WAR IT WAS

what a war it was!
existential:
    you alone, standing
against humanity

a brutal battle, which
Praised be God you won
with your
       devilish déception
heavenly weapons and
sublime technology

annihilating everything extraneous
              alien to
your big picture
outside
    core prophecy

returning the species
back

   to the Stone Age
those few straggling remnants
you suffered to survive

what a war it was!
down
     in the edicts
   since Cain
    first slew Abel
back at the blood dawn of time

PRAY CONTINUE

PRAY CONTINUE

I am badly wounded
haemorrhaging everything

waiting for
your coup de grâce

drenched in blood
surrounded by
scraps and
pieces of what was
once humanity

bits of bone
embedded in the
brain-spattered altar
in this place of shelter

I am not quite dead yet
so pray continue

lest
I bear witness

still a mathematical possibility
I might survive

AWAY

AWAY

friendly fire kills
without any
bad intentions

its bullets and bombs
morally superior

but let us pause
for a moment here
for establishing shot
and then
extensive tracking

as we go for
metaphor and
superimposition

passing all those broken
riddled statues
of Mary
   and the Christ

in search of a man
called Wilfred, dead now
but formerly a captain

machine-gunned within
sight of peace and an
end of the war

    correction, apologies, end
of the war to end all wars

pity we are late
for he was the all-
time expert in battlefield elegy

thinking
of butchered aid workers
he would know
what to write

he would know
what words to kill the lie
sweep away
convenient narrative

a Britsh poet himself
already long-forgotten
the art of a true-blue
true-
   blooded imperial culture
to sweep such things away

HISTORY CHANNEL

HISTORY CHANNEL (KIND OF REMEMBER ME THAT SIEGFRIED SASSOON) watched a video on World War One who started it who finished it who went who stayed at home who came back like my Mother’s Dad big gong of a medal around his soft young neck which is just as well otherwise wouldn’t be here myself to waste your time as Siggie’s bishop himself didst poetically proclaim the ways of God being satirically strange watched a video on the channel on World War One same as the last one same people won

TANGENTIAL

TANGENTIAL

as the camera pans
and tracks

keenly observant
as the eye of God

    note all of it
down
take it
      into evidence:

here a triptych of images
from the bowels
of Hell
            avenues of billboards
picturing the unspeakable

and here words untethered, words
     of wild association

and here
in consequence, dancing
                         on fresh graves

grinding down the monuments
crushing the flowers

all we
need is a river
                    coiled like
a serpent
        and we have apocalypse now

      *****

Excuse me
          apologies for

throwing you into this headlong
without thought of a preamble

felt you are
so familiar with this
terrain
          no introduction required

observe us now: myself
and an odd band
of philosophers
                in open formation

making huge headway as
we navigate the path
between
      battlefields

move from battlefield to
battlefield
      observing with horror

how far we have slid
from regime of rational truth

and the care
of the wise gods

finding the think tanks and
complexes and factories

structures wide
as whole cities, reaching
upward to Heaven
                      portals to
supremacy

foundaries for the steel and ghe stone for us to build
our lush monuments

utterly expressive of our
desire
     for eternal comfort
and peace

and as
      for the price paid

we do not
         let it run away from us
but
   (in tight formation now)
keep it
      carefully monitored

the debt in hard currency
always balanced
in blood

for philosophically speaking
this is
    a landscape of division
cruel dialectic
and dichotomy

those who did this finding
means to speak that
horror

      terrifying their madness
out of them

sculpting the darkness
                    of the species in
such
exquisitely warped
                      form

A WORD

A WORD

let me have a word

let me fill
you in
from a poetry

am going to need
twenty, maybe
thirty
thousand
characters already

oops1 sorry,
my apology

did I say
“characters”?

that was a bit
of a fatal Freudian slip

I meant to say “words”;
no sorry: lines

no I am completely wrong

in the wrong

to do this justice
I need to write
the final
death count
as poems

EXERCISE

EXERCISE

you cannot go
into a classroon
proclaim to
the kids

today, children, I have
something lovely
for you to do:

today
      in class
we are going to get
creative

have
real fun, drawimg
painting what
      the soldier saw

or sculpt a little diorama
or create a tiny script

and then
     enact it

as a play, or maybe film
the play or maybe

a black and white or
technicolout film

we have
           so much red paint
it’s going to be spectacular

buckets of red paint
for you head
                to toe
to slosh around

an exercise for all of us
to forever remember

death is the scene
            death must

never forget

GROUNDWORK

GROUNDWORK

thanks
for all the
lies you told me

they really helped
allowed me
to not see
the light

no way we can call for
death by saturation, round-

  • the-clock-bombing

without
ourselves with symbols and images
being saturation bombed

this doing the groundwork
softening the landscape

preparing
for the unacceptable

digging the graves in advance