Our own tongue throat stranger
And failing to nourish will or may perish
We pause, wishing to answer betters in Irish
Cannot know a lost language
Vanishes, we answer in English
Less than swill of which our Liffey consists.
What is Irishness
What is native wit?
Slack jaws guffawing
Slenting houses built from haunted bricks
Wheezing with upright’s effort
Struggling to stand upright
At the parade ground
Injured soldier overjingoistic, too old, told no twice
Falls, loud crack, back a big bruise smackmiddle
Tom Brown blackened back fast to grate.
They called it the Great War, I agree it was great
My antient need for death sated
Enfield-wielding human cheesegrater
Touchdown when I take the field, sick goal celebrations
I’m like a Dacian with a dayjob, violence a vocation
Fist drop me have me bopping walking like bambi won’t stop
Have to clock me clean and put me sleeping or we’re still boxing
I’m Joxer but I’m not going to Stuttgart
Philly shell and good guard, finishing what you start
I don’t care if you call the Gards
Hope your garb is flame retardant
Unassuming champion, you shouldn’t have started on
Drive my car right into your back garden
I’ve got guts like Jack the Ripper
Your ma’s inside reading a bodice ripper
Pinching a nipple you nipped on as nipper.
I am lamed for a time and never tamed
Who anyway is keeping time
I am always back fast to greatness
I slip through a grate, sewer’s famous satanist
Sewage my fastness, vast effluent pools I loom in seeking jewels
Above the land’s lie the land’s lay the land is fucked from peak to bay
Eyries sky-scraping, boring cloudbellies, on which settle eaglic anpiels.
I’m peeling back a plastic cell to get my medicine and get well, war’s hell
For some but I was humbled by death closebrushing
Must have Prussian blood rushing in my veins
Day we went over the top, rain over the salient
Missile-made alien, alas raid in vain
Most my battalion slain, but gosh I was enflamed
As not in decades, in glory blaze’d with bayonet raised
Wolf in me bayed, has not thence rested once
Slumber flees nightly, I watch flylike spyplanes skycycling
You should have seen it, guns numerous as Russians
Janus front, guns jamless to east and west
Men abreast me depressed into fleshy sedge by eleven inch shells
Soldiers shelved by whizzing sheet metal, it sounds and looks like hell.
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