Tag Archives: war

FIRESIDE CHAT

FIRESIDE CHAT

you thought it would be
a great idea, a jaunty
self – promotion
to give
us a fireside chat

be we all
got incinerated

before which
you told us a great joke
which you were sure
we would love,
respond with ratings-
boosting love
whose punchline just
so happened to
be that
we were all now at war,
update, quick correcton:
that we were
all dead in the war

nevertheless, we loved it,
your aporoval rating
simply shot through
the roof,
the recently-remodelled
trillion dollar roof and ceiling

whereupon
it went ballistic, fully hypersonic,
caught us terminally ill-
prepared as it
did shoot us
in the foot, and
running to you for
not in our price range, not
in any price range medical cover

you droned on at liberty
focusing on the extremity of doubt
written across the touch-screen
of all our citizen faces

swearing it was all AI,
we had been duped by
the extremely accurate powers
of falsification
generated in some
secret hostile media bunker
by pretty terrible
election-
stealing, fake
narrative AI

being dead, however,
we were by no means able
to respond to
or comment on the veracity of that

burnt to death
by your fireside chat

BOGIES

BOGIES

we called our push
carts bogies

tue richer kids, from
up the street
ordered theirs, in
screw-together
streamlined
   formula one kits

mine
   my grandfather, my Mother’s
father had to make, mine
pram wheels and axels
and an old
pantry shelf he
painted purple
“the mauve monster” as
it was dubbed
     my the flash kids, the
speed aces,
the titans
   from the top of our road
as they sped past me
effortlessly

but they did not get to see
this man of few words
and (to me)
much mystery
at work, an engineering
marvel of
perfect proceas
or check the Great War
kit pinned up
high on
his cellar
workshop wall

same cellar where in 1940
as my Mother told me
her elder sisters
    returning late
had tried to sneak in
delivered,
   by a tank and
this man, their father ever
vigilant
   had caught them before
they were able to sneak
unspotted up to bed

sure they were
Hitler’s finest, having
ditched their parachutes
sneaking in
through the cellar to
take their revenge

for what he did
in his twenties to their
uncles and fathers over
his two years
on the Western Front with
the instrument of
mass death that
saved him
    back then
a genuine water-cooled point
303 Vickers medium
machine gun

without which no him no
daughters no mother
ultimately
      no me

I wonder when it was
my Mother, still a child
must have
fitst noticed it
what questions she asked
what she thought
what she knew, imagined
of that war

back to the bogies, my
purple bogie
      last memory of my life
in the North
of England back then

bogies
    such a strange war-haunted
Battle of Britain word

the skies back then full
of 109s and Heinkels and
Dorniers
      fight for survival, standing
alone against Nazism (and
new old
enemy Germany)
all for
democracy (not Empire) and
all that is good in
mankind and
noble
in the world

my Mother
became strange as she aged,
my father too in that still
clinging to
colonialism pre-
liberation South Africa

others came
      we left

my Mother so aghast
years later
    to hear who it waa exactly now
living in that house

place of her menories
(and who
     know what subtle, pervasive,
inevitable
family warfare)

source of my
purple, magnificent bogie
its maker
and his
machine gun

long time passed, younger
in years when he did than
my age now

RWGIME CHANGE

REGIME CHANGE

we are meeting for coffee
fifty years to the day
we last
saw, spoke
to each other

could be real could
be just a dream

reality getting so porous
you could easily just
stick out
your hand
test the fabric

odds and probabilities
suggest five times in nine
you could
stick
your finger
straight through

the veil fading, evaporating
and something no less
ephemeral now
about the realm
of truth

all of which we do not discuss
hard after all those years
to find common
ground, something
worth sharing we
know
will be appreciated

meanwhile flashing in neon
writing on the wall
portents eveywhere
suddenly it
is all
a troubling semiotics
of apocalypse

heads blown off my
bombs, pulverized by
missiles

innocents vaporized
at primary school

signs and codes of
death and
second
coming, dynasties
of temple

perhaps (thinking aloud)
the world needs regime
change
for our very survival we
need every single regime changed

I feel, though you
shrug, the betrayed presence
of a half smile.

FROZEN

FROZEN

I am a
plastic action figure

to hazard a guess
you who position me
might call
me Napoleonic

here we
are now crossing a river

the bridge I am on now
may not be still standing
when we return

but
    led with acuity
there is no possibility
that it
all
go wrong

that here in our ranks
supremely confident of glory
we might
     be rebuffed, die
in the snow
become some
carnival of death
broken and shattered,
for all
who might follow
a most cautionay tale

but here we are
marching, one massive
armee together, when
the dice
they get thrown

will all
spring into battle
do our
soldierly duty

loyal
to a fault
to flag
and Emperor

ready
to give our
little lives
in combat

freeze in the snow, starve,
or die
otherwise
unnecessarily

slowly, quickly,
in manner most horrible

returned to
that big plastic or
cardboard box
where plastic soldiers go

without thought, without
afterthought,

without thought at all, feelings
or memory, waiting to
be called, frozen in
stance
soldiers
to the end

LEARNING CURVE

LEARNING CURVE

you tried to
bomb history
whilst
   we weren’t watching
looking the other way

some fog of
war,
        this,

given how you smokescreened
the whole of humanity

whilst you
gave it your best shot
blowing the social, the economic,
the political foundations
of our world
(last faint possibilities of
a rational world)
horizon to horizon
to kingdom come

first take you had
was that you
might decapitate us,
a single bomb to do it,

as the logic deepened
carpet bombing persuaded
devastate everything
send back
to the stone ages
before boots on the ground

they are reading
about you now
       the kids of the future

of gross military stupidity
you have become
a cautionary tale

history
     rewriting you, how
best to set up
the punchline

last laugh as always, hate
to be
    the one
(steepest ever learning curve)
to give away the game
    


SCRIPTURE

SCRIPTURE

thick smoke pouring
skyward indicating
target-rich environments

things
balanced on
a scalpel-sharp
knife edge
nuclear option
not least of all

and here I am in
the basement stack
a year before
we met
used to chat
in this exact place

half
a century ago

here I am
deep down in the
bowels of the University library
(the same
library destined
to burn)

reading
the Upanishads, wondering
about the nature
of consciousness,
transcendence and
this thing
they call the
soul

outside the thick rain clouds
hitting us with an
insane deluge
as they cross
the mountain

and
me diving deeper into
these sanskrit scriptures
(in translation)

losing all
sense of
space and time

the ghost presence of that
briefest moment
of being
together,

swirling about me
unseen, promise of
something
beyond special
never destined
to be

those thick clouds rising
above an expanse
of ferocious
flames

this is not going
to end well

chance that
what ends it
ends everything

so much
for all of us to lose,
we
played this so badly
so stupidly,

the laws of physics
that tell us
we are all
if small
matter

infinite energy
a small Sun a
flash of light of
miraculous intensity

and
crazy as it sounds, obessive
truly

the balance
slipping, tipping

thinking of you

something of the truth
of you there
in those scriptures

HALF-TIME SCORE

HALF-TIME SCORE

oodles of suffering
eating this icecream
without sprinkles

the icy cold vanilla
travelling down
a tooth nerve

but, hold your horses,
let’s get the half-time score
from the West Asia war
all those cruise and
ballistic missiles leveling
high rises as if
they were fragile confections

death feasting on the complicit
as ravenously as
with the innocent

death longing
for a war that
will annihilate us all
nuclear winter us
out of this,
bad joke of a time

THERE

THERE

there
at the edge
of wine-dark sea

justice and power
at loggerheads

power ganging up
determined
once and for
all
to crush justice
calling in
all an sundry

ash gray confederacy
of forces and armies
desperate to
cleanse
   five thousand
years of history
wipe thousand years
off the map

and they have been
redrafting, redrawing,
rewriting everything

this is prime nineteenth
century in a
Jason Vorhees mask

maybe
    before
one evil, stupid misjudgment
kills us

we will all trundle back home
call it stalemate
shake on a peace
to last until
new duplicity

there is no
decisive, definitive end
that brings honour
or any redemption possible

final resolution that
hope for justice deserves