In the confusion
He finds himself shirtless
His crusader and St.George tattoos brandished,
Siegheiling at police,
As he defends a cenotaph that receives no assault,
That marks not a nations best moment
But these thousand’s last.
His pile of stone,
Holding displaced memoriam
For those who have had the choice taken away.
Giant plastic poppy on the grill of the van faded to a blanche
pink
All lame; all blind
Men who think all are soft
Who talk about the psychological damage they
never received from being beaten as children
The world has moved
But they are tripping on the carpet that is whipped away
Mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells.
Englands worst sons
an intolerant hatred that is really fear
A fear that their dad’s think them weak
A fear that the bars on their successes
Are unnatural and external
That the world they believe their heroes fought for or against or
within
A world, they imagine, of rosy-cheeked anglo kids
Playing unheeded in a school playground
A fear that this tableau is leaving them;
They cling to the world’s worst wound
To those intolerably nameless names…
With the same confusion that Pizarro’s conquistadors
Burned the Inca’s ‘mosques,’
They bare their teeth across the channel,
Despite the treaties, the wall,
Despite the spectres and ruins that haunt the mainland;
Despite all before and after.
What does it mean, the gaudy decal of silhouetted soldiers
In a bleak battlefield where the sun sets on the side of your van?
What are you trying to remember about the wars you never fought in
By men heedlessly forgotten?
The unheroic dead who fed the guns?
A culture revolves, enclosed and red-faced,
probably forgetting the lesson
it probably never learnt.
