The
angels play kettledrums for these dead men:
smiling,
sad as colonels handing out medals,
medals
for dead men,
medals
for warriors who went forth
and
multiplied their gift for death,
casting
apocalyptic pearls before ungrateful swine,
sowing
seeds on infertile ground.
This is war! All will be destroyed.
There
will be no garden of liberation.
A tin machine
with angry, jubilant, glorious others underneath
waves in deep trenches of mud:
a second drum-roll of celluloid images
contrived by the avant-garde chosen few,
imagining the burnt out survivors,
their paltry offerings,
their pleading hands wailing.
Now, running away:
not an army, not a parade of green berets,
merely a pawn in the underground,
smelling of piss and fear,
of ammonia and amino acid,
of endings and beginnings.
Soft
bellied, raging and ragged,
dragged
into the bright
magnesium
light,
a
death march across the chess-board,
remembering
soft, pink milky tits
and
being blown to bits -
the
wind pushing you ever forward.
Forward by His Light,
this infernal God of Zion,
benignly smiling down
on the broken shell
of this broken town.
Broken and breaking down,
you lie on the roof of the world,
staring down into a white free sun,
high as sky high love light,
white shadows before your body.
You feel nothing
but these pink tit bits,
this blood, this mud:
hear angels singing
alongside the sirens...
soft and
gentle, touching you with their wounds,
drifting like chiffon dressed brides
dancing through corn,
drifting like Christ on his cross, illuminating bodies far
below
sprayed in meat bits across this charnel ground,
rusted metal dreams unsprung, like tank bits rattling
to the timpani of exploding shell casings,
a crease of cordite
ensnaring your senses.
Such
pain in these dreams:
red
as aerated blood,
sharp
as a cut-throat razor.
The red leaking out into the soil,
leaching the body of all vitality,
leaving it blue as winter's breath.
Hopeless,
this dreaming of something white:
hopeless,
this dreaming of something soft.
You
remember only, how to breathe.
Breathe,
nearly naked small boy at her breast,
free
like wind, eat up the Earth,
like
swimming in warm amniotic fluid.
Sustenance
in your belly:
a
field-mouse caught unawares,
caught
in the snare of your broken hands,
once,
so here and now,
now...
nothing.
How
red meat disgusts!
You
remember other times...
Shells
exploding all around you,
thick
clouds of acrid smoke,
the
burning at the back
of
your throat.
You didn't stay
and die like all the others.
You didn't talk of home-cooking,
of cricket matches on village greens.
You
said
life is not a piece of cake.
Now
you croak, in your blood-gargled throat,
in
asphyxiating toxic mud: the corporal cries out
last
one into the bunker's a dead man
Bombers
pass overhead, grinding the sky
to
gunmetal dawn. A second sun
rises
in the East. You hear your mouth
leading
you down the rutted road
towards
death: a red maiden
walking
the red squares of the chess board.
You
are frightened by these half-starved hallucinations,
command
them in a whisper to
Nothing
else: too ragged for flight, too week to fight.
They
strike, like orange-red flowers of death,
like
an orgasm of Christ-light,
the
swollen blinking of schrapnel,
the
thundercrash of the master race.
Death
slinks away, leaving moon-craters
in
fields of brilliant fertility.
Your
legs twitch
with
the itch to run away,
but
movement doesn't come.
Then
a sense of tranquillity descends:
fear
backs out the door,
leaving
you alone -
a
serotonin flood of unexplained joy
lodged
in your brain, like a stone.
You
sense death approaching
like
an aching virgin bride,
her
hands outstretched and glowing.
She
is Mary, the woman of sorrows,
melting
in a river of salt water...
and
then she is gone, gone, gone.
Voices,
echoing through liquid:
they
call you back to the here and now
of
corpses and gunshot orchestras,
the
serenade of mustard gas
and
you replay and replay
the
same old worn out can of film -
you
are running back
to
the small, shelled town
where,
only days before,
you
were strung out and toxic,
waiting
for orders to advance.
You
are running back. No fragment of your
being
moved
to false heroics.
Absenting yourself without leave
because you couldn't take leave of
your senses.
I am running back
No
falling for the stoic myth:
you
dream of flying free,
lying
in the blood-soaked earth,
under
the cover of charred, scorched fronds
that
once were crops.
See
her coming to you, blond hair in pleats.
A
corn dolly. A hallucination:
the
devil dancing on a fiery sea of stones.
Let my hometown fry in a firestorm, you mutter,
grateful
for release from this war. Then you see
her,
her
pink tits milking your thirsty mouth,
an
angel emissary of the starving deity:
you
hear her bagpipe wail, her disarray,
the
mocking cabaret of dead men,
the
vile smell of freight trains.
I am nothing, you cry out into the night,
a man-swat fly of fear,
a part of those who would strike out
at a random bunch, a random race...
be they ugly or Christ-like and gentle.
You
are running towards faraway hills,
an
early small boy naked:
feel
nothing now but your lungs...
remembering
how to breathe.
Running
now, a scream tore her...
to
free her breast like the wind,
that
you may eat up the Earth.
Her
teats like matchwood, leading your mouth to death.
Stones
on the red squares of this board.
Here lies an unknown soldier.
Too anonymous
when the orders came in.
Here,
there is no garden of England:
no
return to the soft rebate of hills,
the
rose twines of church gates
and
Sunday roast cricket.
You will never eat from
these bodies burnt, twisted, torn
in
soft brown moist gravy,
an
idyll of rural angels and chess boards,
red
& white gingham of schoolgirl innocence.
This
is the wretchedness of all this bloody war:
there
can never be a return.
These
medals are for killers.
This
kingdom, this green and pleasant land,
this
happy-ever-after
is
a lie, a satin wrapped syphilitic whore.
There
is nothing left in this burnt out aftermath:
nothing
to breathe;
just
this torn pink tit of flesh in your side
(and
no pain anymore)
just
a choir of vengeful angels
singing
you down to dust:
so,
you are Christ
and
all red meat disgusts.
Read more of Dee Rimbaud's
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