When order flies and chaos thrives
When skydown bombs cause men to dive
In sucking mires, where men and horses die
I employ a wild strategy to help me survive;
As soon as I hear rattling guns, I salute immediately
If anyone tries to shoot me, I’ll die with my boots
Scopes will train on me, they dare not wound
It is bad luck to shoot a loon so soon
After the blood moon
Others swoon like death’s visage was beautiful
I stand ditiful, spiffing young lad strapping, brave in battle
Wode was on me then, sense was overthrown
I don my berzerker’s bear hair shirt, like I work at Dublinia again
I was into madness; woe of my foes which in waves are sent.
I run from one shell hole to another carrying my own pack, bad batsman
Pissrag to stop gas smothering me
Mad hatter, solely shadows owning like a batman
Impacting rain abrasive the front changing
Slime of the salient like the bog of ancients
Choked with unwilling sacrifice
The votive knife slicing from barrels red hot piping
Bullets like lightning in speed, Sleipnir’s bane
Or quick-tossed grenades, or a slow sniping
Death is a piper and he pipes all night
Snipers taking pot shots my way
Highway formed of sludge
Rats run the length of sludgy runnels carved by artillery Ezekiels
My khaki trousers mudspattered, claggy, cracking and heavy as my pack
I screw off my bayonet and use it to whack away the harder stuff
I reach into my mobile larder
Take a smoke out light it with my lucifer fast as a charger
Smoking a pack of day since I hit Picard clay.
Mammetz wood anyone, certain cure for lust of blood
Lying facedown in the shrubbery
His congealing blubber rank in the hot summer
His butter-coloured fingers with a fudgy texture
I turn him over, his overgiving flesh like overfresh fruit
What before was his visage has been corrupted, flyblown
Ill-suited for prose, let alone a sacred poem
He was mostly bone, though some flesh clung on dogged
Evidently, a rocket struck him, though it appeared a rock
Had struck him savagely, as on some primeval planet
Gaining advantage in days before Adam, parts of him atomised
Utterly, I surmised better to check his pockets: dockets, a beloved’s locket
Token that might be proffered to a glass case, gazed at in amazement
Hole to center grizzly open casement yet I face it
He is phased to alteration
What stasis his groundturned face paved gave away at his pate’s raising
His face fell away like wet wallpaper
A gallery of pain, his exposed mainframe
Maze of frayed wires, hempen hawsers outfalling
Sprawling like Rapunzel’s ponytail
His eyes freed of glaze roll from caves
Like ghouls from out of graves brain-craving
Case in which his brain resided formerly
Before his unborning, his torturous malforming
Sits now like an open cave
Brave Northron spelunkers awaiting, chain with his name
He was brave and now blameless
Among Homer’s graceful immortal dead, pocket the change
Pockmarks along a grassless mile, like postholes, marking unmarked graves
The unready, the unwary, all unsaved
Interred unsaintly beneath the salient
Awaiting the day of judgement
The ancient of days
The new sun’s ray encasing.
Some flee, I am here by king’s decree, bullets miss me
Screaming of bisected horses, Tommies dissected glad they’re dead
Funeral of the unwedded
A million nameless dead inscribed upon a cenotaph
Tides parting like I held aloft a staff, waves crashing down at my back
Dashing Pharaoh’s twenty thousand strong chariot force
Such as it was in this war, when mechanical force foreswore bravery’s best
Third tranche in France
Frontline since early days, flatlining in my battle trance
Steel shrapnel barbed wire genocide
Night’s denial at flight of lightful flares.
From gorgon’s leadbelching eye none can hide, destroying alldescrying
All this crying foreseen in my black scrying mirror, left back in Bethune
No flares required, for the full moon sheds a tallow sun’s light
Light on my feet sticking to trees and piled scree, debris of an old church
Grimace at the ivy’s loudness
Girdling my head the climbery; the green man of Vimy
I was on the frontline at the Somme
Some like it hot, I like it raining down bombs
My heart is a song sung by a drunken viking
Long in glory, his horn sounding endless
Venomous rivers slither between freshdug canyons
Cannonsong, I make my way through collapsed dugouts
Corpses snouting out, those who did not make it out
Hands jutting out, mouths craving dustless air therein, scouting
Forward I creep low moving as a stole might all bend and meander
I take a gander at the remnants of a grenadier
My foot sinks further than expected, near Atlantis
It like a realm of bad fantasy, this flensed France
No bird sings, no leaf and no branch, no blade of grass
No ants, just corpses and rats and death’s many chances
Chanting in who knows what language, ducking well practiced
It all seems to vanish, charging forward with perhaps anguish
My vision is blurred and I am taxed overly, my fatigues crack
With every forward step as do the rifles, cackling like crones at my back
I smack against the wall as a missile smashes into the ground ahead of me
Tracks of a rudimentary tank lacking shell and crew, flames crackling
Snipers track but miss me, I can only kiss my miraculous medals
I can barely discern the slick, splinter-spined duckboards
Beneath grim, toxic battle wine; blood, soot, mud, disease, gas, horse.
I left my mask in my billet, quicker to sprint and fight another day
When you’re got you’re got there’s no other way, but I won’t cop it today
As I say it, to spite me, a grenade almost slays me, exploding not two metres away
Eventually wet clay hardens giving to hay, on the frayed edges of the conflict
Here I hear neither wolves nor woeful missiles whistling, I listen
And for the first time in months hear birdsong
I can almost hear the worm turning
Ears burning for melody, tired of doleful threnody sent by enemies, blessed see
A sea of grass and wildflowers, loud with the bee, on the leeside of heaven
The rays his radiance sheds meet my legs
Music as heard in opiate mount Abora
I am suddenly without boots, my rank livery removed
I am proofed in pure white, wearing sandals on the arboreal mountain
Surreal theatrically as in a flight of fancy yet more tangible, reality
Hiding in my priest hole, praying to saint barbara
I take aim, fire, the rest is on the armourer
I shed my scythe, yet remain a farmer
It all seems barmy from here, I do no harm anymore
I allow the fastened door of my armoured core to creep open
Out seeps adoration’s light, igniting a fire all along the ridge
A beacon fire calling every sight, come to this fire’s might, this night
All fighting will cease, mothing towards that utter brightness
From above, surely a thing godsummoned, which man is not mustered to it
No more clouds of mustard gas will swim across no man’s land, bad for lungs
Moses how it leads them out, this must be the promised land
The living come to embrace the vanquished, the enmity’s source vanished
No more are conflict’s flames fanned, no more do planes down
Like phoenixes languishing from axe hits, in circles sitting
Like planets in placid orbit, sharing stories, none of war, none of glory
Hostility ends forever, all gordian knots are severed, the violent and the clever
Unite to make everything better, no more the belting gavel, no more the belt
And rod, no more the gravelled meadow, no more the shadowed citadel
No more cavalry, no more children in dire need, no more amputees on the street
No more chimneys belching acrid toxins, no more sewage in the Atlantic
No more the reign of Pan, no more is the prophecy of Atlantis applicable
Efforts once fickle now mighty united, thriving unseen, violence’s balm
Is calmness and plenty, respect and filled belly, bounty for all, denizens
Equal in quality and esteem, all may pride and pursue life unfettered
Knowing no gods and no betters.
Alchemisland 
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