by TheBruceDougals
In the pause
Between shellfire
Lies the secret
(hands have more power than the mind; only hands can pull the sky down; only hands can squeeze life out of the air; minds are only engines without tracks to drive them into the ground; hands can slap harder than the impact of any weaponry created by the pathetic minds of men)
What good
Is knowing the point
When the point will be
The first one killed?
(Too sharp to hold too fine to ignore too retched to live too dangerous to love)
Out of craters
Crawl words
Like the last breath
Of men and horses;
(futility of effort might as well make corduroy roads with live men and leave the map reading to the dead)
Herein lies
The secret
Shine your shoes
From past wounds
Too bottomless
To ever fully settle;
From the most putrid bile
Comes the foundation
Of creation;
(so comes the mutilation of mud and stone; only men could take two beautiful treasures and render them lifeless)
Grow wheat
So it can be
Cut down;
(do not discriminate in disembodiment of the banal; all must be treated with the same incoherent disdain)
Take deep breath
And abandon them
Far from shore
So they can drown
In their own spittle;
(no sidewalk footpath or trail will ever be wide enough to fully accept the impudent exhale of human architecture)
Garnish each step
With land mines
And barbed wire
For we all must take
That fateful step;
(stairs without risers see deeper than any scholar prophet poet or general)
Until then each plod
Is fortuitous
In its plantation
And harvest;
This is the secret.
(take every stain blemish drop of sweat and misshapen thread from every uniform you have ever worn and burn them; including your skin; the needle knows your thoughts and the eye has no pity)
Get as close
To the shellfire
As possible
And create;
(enemies are inkwells
their blood is ink,
rifles are feathers
the bayonet
the feather’s point,
and no-man’s land
is a journal; medals are morphine
as armistice is methadone)
(if hate is a crime in war then survival is a cruel joke told by maggots to the dead)
Under pain of life
What manner of strife
Can abate
The insolence
Of breath
Before the shellfire ends
And death
Takes its rightful bite
Out of the fallacy of knowledge.
(twelve only exits to remind us of the importance of eleven)
