From the vantage of a top window I watch khaki ants vanish
Factions action bound make passage
Leaving in jolly batches, in patchwork and motley
Returning in patch and blood-blotted bandage
Hand in hand the gas damaged living in the land of Nod
Distant action
A sense of traction, of freefall
Inked names suffer no retraction
Unlike letters home, subject to redaction
They hear only the reactions of the state actors upon state apparatus, better to trap us
Etching names in barks to mark their passage
Right away me soldier boy.
In ditches the bloated corpses flyblown
In the last of the living a flame guttering out
Death in the gutter, none utter about the stars or wonder what came ere
They beg most for mothers
Milk of the self smothers his udders, shuddering under his cheese-bored covers
He mutters faintly before he is ushered
To safety. Where once golden rapeseed
Made France an Elysium find a mire of seizing mud, villages of medium strategic importance become gore-busy abbatoirs
Horses killed in thousands
Heroes run through by mausers soil their trousers
Legs crossed like a dowser’s rods, a ditch you wouldn’t bury a dog in, threw dog tags in after him
Bodies putrefy, liable
To induce sickness, like tribal
Trophies, the inner frames of rivals
Gleaming ribs, open throat no more ribald
Songs it will sing, half a piebald
Like a damaged rocking chair stuck in the mud, hoofs to the air
A leg needing more than stitches, a snapped thigh bone jutting out
Blown up by a mills, bodies in hills
Filling the bills of the kill eaters, still
They tell the old lies, bogholes where the ardent die
Anonymous meat spilling out, gut like a breached pie, a squelchy pile of linked guts that stretched could go a mile
Grown swollen like ill lymph nodes, loads
Of flies thick as cloud a rotten fruit bowl
Enormous shells bowl them over
Bullets thick as stinging bees above a vast field of clover, delight of the cloven one.
Troopers are moving
Roads are improving
Gas and shell have made a hell
Above which floats a gloam
Xanthous and cancerous, well
Deep the holes men fell down whole.
Mustard tinged wind, a vast cloud of lungcorroding tendrils sweeping in
Ill wind the vain cannot sit still
The order instilled in the men disappears
As the gunwall shears the line
At the duckboards the rude whore counts out two rums a head
The first head that peeps over the parapet gets sent back dead
The whistles demand advance but a coward holds his hands
His CO remands him with a bullet, doesn’t take a backward glance
He vaults over the top, drops
To his knees, ocelots
Forward along the ground, between mounds where the drowned and the downed pilots frown up from tossed ground
His hand for a helm, he shoulders across no man’s land in search of the men in his command
A demanding task, all sense of angle is lost in the mangle of atrocities, vast tangles of barbed wire demand
A measured pace, only by some profound grace
Does he emerge unscathed to the remnant of a hay bale
He spies a corpse impaled by a metal railing, contorted beyond an alien
The creation of an insane pygmalion
Bombing changed gradient of once flat plains so that it became a place of steep changes and pungent murrains
Shards of better ages churned up when soil rains down.
Alchemisland 
Leave a comment