Olive drab masses
Endless, nameless
Choke on colourless commands
As they stem the silver tides.
Mothers weep as their flowers wilt
Sergeants smile when asked of guilt
“All those boys knew that they’d signed to serve
so all those cowards got what they deserved”
Safety’s luxuries a stranger seldom met
By fresh faced boys too scared to be upset
Put up in arms when so many have no arms left
Don’t forget to forget Harry
He’s casually, your casualty
The unmarked bereft.
Still the grinning towers of death
Give contorted greets and winks
To poor penny dreadful boys
Who linger on sanity’s thinning brink
Resplendent in their patchwork green
on grey days, so morbidly obscene
Condemned waiting on a land of scars
Caught between boyhood and its capars
Dressed up so proud, could war be any absurder?
Dressing up so Pretty, signing up for murder
Even beggars can’t be choosers
But they’re begging to be chosen
To join regiments of resentment
And greet steel relief half frozen
Bloated generals grin as they recruit
”What is fodder in exchange for loot?
Its money that makes the world spin around
And he’s just another boy never to be found”
Hollowed bastions stained with glistening crimson guilt
Housing greedy blinded generals with remorseless deciding powers
Over fractious factions with their man-hoods, man-built
Whom scratch their skins to cleanse the sins of humanity devoured.
All but two figures of opposing purity
Concealed in their childhood havens
Watch the wounds of their pretend friends
Get picked clean by starving ravens
Before ruthless iron truces kept them apart
Now only metres of bitter lifeless stone
The anonymity of bloodshed battle’s only art
Isolating brothers to fight one another, alone.
Mass indoctrination a friend shaped reaper
Plying expiring clones with rare rationed rum
Faltered smiles disguise bodies ever weaker
Devoid of morals and to disease they succumb
Unknown to dear old rotten Ross
That he would never be laid to rest
He died clutching crutch and cross
But he never could leave blessed
Sentimentally censored letters
Offer the cruel pretence of escape
From the shrapnel torn skies
That beckon bullet hole heartache
Ricochet, ricochet, ricochet, ricochet.
And the silver spark pierces his head
Lordship rests; bed of barbed bracket
Replaced by a tramp of a man instead
The claims of this futile fight
Are indistinct of any class
Ending every stalemate night
For any who should pass
The contrast of imperial wealth
Has never been better illustrated
Than by this ceaseless stealth
Destroying what Vicky created
Sweet infants proud of daddy’s fairytales
Tightly seal and shut their ears
And then spend their tears
On those martyred without need or nails
But even as the boy-made gashes
Linear wounds on the landscape
Begin to bridge the chasm and lose shape
There are still dormant youth, never to escape
They were dead where they stood
Just as they will rot where they fell
It is cruel and yet understood
Why their deathly rest is their living hell.
