Rough Medley: Two More for the War

"Field Before Blitzkrieg"


They make love hastily over his scattered uniform
On the faded clump of hay among the thistling weed

Her muted cries with the buzzing of the humid haze
The open field breezes and smell of dried salivas
Beside the silent ribbings of rusted tank and jutted spoke

The soldier glimpses his rifle angled nearby
Through the window of her flexed helplessed leg

And the corresponding clouds above take on the shape
Of shattered annunciation to the ruinous fates of man

While the far surrounding apple blossoms shudder
At the approaching of another unnatural thunder.


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"Jack of Clubs and the Shamrock of Moon"


Of all the words I made, all the words I never used,
Of all the time I had, but in my shods, remained.

Depressing more silent steps through the steaming peat
By the sick-white snows, receding as my scenes
From another winter spent without you.

Here in my waiting through this emptying night,
By the ink-still lake below a closer moon,
I let your reachless forms make disguise of time,

In the last-second eyes at the end of my free-fall mind,
Where flickering again, are the words I never said,
The things we never did.

And I know there are reasons why I am not with them,
My regiment drinking up the town, the town that lies hidden
Somewhere over there in the wooly wood-hued lamp-globes
Poking through the choking flesh of fog,

The fog that surrounds me in its’ folding dusk-opaqueness,
That separates my existence from the everything of everyone else.

The fog that sat in those ghastly twisted trenches
Like the bags under my shelled-out sockets;
That tell of a body that has been wasted away
In these four long years without you.

And on the few allowed nights of return to this icy-marsh moment,
Where my wading senses inhabit, and the cold’s infinite sting
Reminds me of your softness my tiny hands must sacrifice
By the hard glass I continue to drink from,

And how I shall never be like one of them, who on the merry cobbles,
Take for memory any chance that offers out of the brickened corners,

I will not spend my night down those amber smoothed-over alleys,
But remember on this damp quay at the edge of the blackness,

All the lines the seeds and stems must follow
Before the mind of wandery star is formed...

And I guess with the last invisible sip I take,
That I must not touch the many and faceless,
But hold to the boundaries of an intricate truth,
To only one, to only you.

And when I sleep into the close forever, and wake bent over
From the prayer that was not said the night before,
Still spun in the time that did not cure the speed,

I burn into my throat another green destiny,
To bring back your moonlit fantasy to the grim
Encroaching grays of the room's one morning window,

I exhale the spiced-sugary breath of ingestion’s decay,
And turn the chrome clovers which tune the basic strings
Through my wooded body of wounded sound,

One last look through my favourite book,
I rummage through my crumpled pack
For the Jack of Clubs missing from the deck,

Before I get dressed to leave again
For this war I will not return from.