60 Second Scream
For Remembrance Day
A landscape of sienna skeletons and barbed wire
Tears at my flesh in the silence of sixty seconds
A trumpet enters my ears and my body screams
As electric charges trace a path across the abyss of history
Through stories that immerse me in a sea of bodies
Bound by youthful blood and the folly of a romance
That hides the agonies of loyalty
A bird’s call through the city’s drone
Draws me to a bush graveyard
Where the stones of memory are dissolving with the surrounding town
The last few ghosts of this dying icon fight back the weeds
Of invading fantasy when reality is a shell hiding by the seashore
A shot echoes through the cliffs of alien lands
Native blood spurts from the chest of righteousness
As children chase freedom through surrender to old men’s certainties
While uncertainty is one old man crying tears of rage
For his uninvited survival
The clouds of forgetting wipe away the trivial pleasures
That hid hands stained with the helpless struggle to hold back
The blood of history
The fingers of desperation toss the coins of fate
Until they fall on the eyes of parchment faces
A line of crosses build a wall of sad legitimacy around rosy dreams
That try to hide you from your fertiliser destiny
The children of empty wealth
Walk weighed down by the nostalgia for courage they can’t see in the mirror
As dates coalesce into ages squeezing the adequacy out of their bloody hearts
And wishful thinking opens them to the justification for warrior sacrifice
A middle aged man throws words of horror and grief
Out into the emptiness that lives and awaits