EXISTING STATE OF THINGS
They sang of heroes but their blood and guts
sung a different song, becoming a glut,
staining the white poppy an Earl Haig red,
the biggest bits they could find were their heads.
Afghanistan failure, the third attempt,
anything less than bravery was contempt
for not endorsing the militarist code.
With metal legs, no balls, no children sowed,
a clinking army joins the job-seekers,
past ancient cannon, those brutal reapers.
Of the incarcerated, one in ten,
former military find journey’s end,
twenty thousand rock to a jail-house ditty
while free comrades dwell in cardboard city,
the wailing in the psychiatric ward,
one hangs by the neck with pyjama cord,
the sensitive young mind could take no more
disorientated on a foreign shore.
But look out for the rough and ready soul
who volunteers that extra bit when told.
No army can be bigger than their dead,
no sleep longer in that eternal bed.
Yet less war to the elite is mere cant
they hyperventilate in parliament,
seeing Syria as a boil to lance.
Savagery worn as a gentle flower,
dressed to kill at memorials jars
with the call for a peace that smells like death,
taking down nations with its firry breath.
Then bourgeois manners with the fork and knife,
the same hands teaches others how to slice
enemies defending their country as ok,
bishops ignore munitions when UK
and in the House of Lords, in purple robes,
they rant the ineffective moral code.
But killers have their own modus operandi,
when a war or two is sometimes handy.
`Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.’
a song from the WW2 situation,
now ignored in more secular times
but its sentiments loud and clear still rhymes.
It is war without victims without names,
each city is a human-shield-blame-game.
How gentle is a drone in the clear blue sky
when judge and jury from its innards shouts die.
Tornados, Mirages, F-16s rabies
the plenipotentiaries of Hades,
the aircraft carrier, missile cruiser
off a desert coast, the ultimate bruiser
of some hundred year old tribal village,
uranium-tipped shells cause fatal spillage.
The poor is still with us as in Shelley’s time,
in ending, his wishes and high hopes climb,
yearning for lost peace, love and concord heaven
in Existing State of Things, 1811.
So now we enter the land of romance,
never did such values ever enhance
England’s nation-making history when
new Tudor England set a cruel trend.
