Let me go to war.

Let me go to war against all the odds,

Against all the ends

And everything that treads in between the grooves

And the cracks in the pavement.



Let me go to war for all that was lost in the fire

Or in the stewing **** of the flooded toilet.

Let me go to war against the loaded dice

And the big fella in his baseball cap

Shifting his fat on the stool,

Awaiting that certain hand that will feed his boy

And get head from his double-dealing wife.



Let me go to war against the ivory towers of hypocrisy

That is the church.

The breathless opulence of a rain soaked cathedral

And the poverty of righteousness

Found in every leap from scripture

And every hungry soul.

In every forgotten feminist.

And still the Pope stands in his robes twined with gold,

Claiming to feed the world.



Oh please, let me slit the throats

Of every person who scoffs at the teenager cutting his wrists,

Or at the old couple fading to grey in a world of multi-coloured ****.

Let me begin the culling

Of those who undermine The Beatles

And all other music

By turning it into another cash cow

And for those that stand with their cameras,

So desperate to chronicle this experience,

That they forget to experience.



And finally, let me go to war.

Let me go to war with myself

For being too quick to judge

And assuming I am the arbiter of fairness

And where the ashtray should sit on the table.

Let me go to war with the demons that fester in my brain

And scratch on the walls of my mind when I try to sleep

And rattle their cages every time I step into a new world.

Let me go to war so that on my deathbed,

My last thought isn’t this:



That for all the money I had made,

For all the times I had got laid,

And even the times I had got high

That I didn’t let those opportunities go by

Where I could just sit in the dark of an October dawn

And watch the rise of the morning sun.