When Forgetting Becomes Far Too Easy.

Dedicated to the countless war poets, and all of whom has died during warfare

“When the prison guards burned his manuscripts,
Nguyen Chi Thien couldn’t stop laughing -
The 283 poems already inside him.” – Ocean Vuong.

To have words engraved into us,
like wood carved
to make a pattern-
pictures of black skies and such hopeless need,
a desire etched adoringly into collar bones
stained with kisses like stamps of self-deceit.
Adorned doubt and
darling there must
be some crack in the moonlight;
the monocle of a mosaic
smiling from the cheeks of this egg shell
prison.
Sunlight electrified through us.
We may never
see this again yet still, the word
resistance
is burnt into us -raising the stakes-
like all those years ago:
blazing for redemption.
How the words of all those
war poets sacrificed
themselves,
how they lit the dim shadows of grief;
how the bodies of those who wrote them,
fractured pieces of femur and bone
relics of broken ring fingers
lost loves,
body parts never coming home;
how they laughed hysterically at the sight of it.
Each verse: pierced through them by a sudden light.
One they could not wash away.
To have those words engraved must be to have
a second chance of recollection,
after everything else
seemingly mortal
is gone.
As the words burst
battered
brutally broken stand like
sentinel soldiers. Forever fighting a war we
only remember for the pyrrhic victories.
Never lungs lost. Whatever the cost-
Never to be devoured by things that hit far too
close to home.
Home-
they had a home they wished they could run too
through that green gas; poisonous cloud
forcing the sizzling sinister
sensation of acidic pain slicing through
skin-
A Daughter, sits beside her Mother wondering when
Daddy will be home,
the clock strikes midnight:
Nail your colours to the mast boys
They never let them fade.