Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Stanley Wilkin Oct 2016
The raven strutted into view-
Dissembling crows
Peered from the tangled grass lashed
Into solemn silence.
The raven assumed a coal-black authority
Driven by its coal-black soul.
Its beak stabbed out automatically
Bleakness of past; spectral futures
Like echoes. Its eyes were cruel drops
Of impenetrable night.
The raven possessed everything in
The imperious manner of a cut-throat-
Killing without fear, without conscience.
It ruled like the destroyer.
Stanley Wilkin Oct 2016
Cowering in the corner, the boy began to cry,
******* in the gloom.
Searching the room
As his father slowly went by.

His father’s reddened ******
Caught under the weak bedroom light
His genitals pink and bright,
Like a swollen crucifix hanging impudently.

“Out my boy.” He called
In a voice that to the child
Sounded like thunder, ill-tempered and wild.
“Daddy needs you.” The father bawled.

The father’s affection was a wound
That disfigured body and mind
Care sullied, love unkind-
First loved, made love to, then wholly ruined.

His father’s hand jabbed the gloom
And laughing cruelly pulled him out
“I knew you were somewhere about.”
Dragging him through the room.

The child at first whimpered,
Then was muted. As his father began,
Through his small body the pain ran,
Biting his lips, the boy quietly simpered.
Stanley Wilkin Oct 2016
Black crows,
smothered jackdaws,
obsessing on religion-
******* on ancient ideas,
drowning in gloomy words.
God made the world to be lived in
not to escape from-
Stanley Wilkin Oct 2016
1
The sun was maliciously hot that day in June.
The heat swelled his dusty wounds
Still raw from crawling-
He circumvented the Taliban
Dragging his rifle through the grass:

Who’s the soldier now my son,
Who is carrying a gun?
Don’t be afraid, the war has just begun.
Go out there and have fun!


From where the river ran
Closer to the camp the insurgents crawled
Lugging their layered forms over rock in the gristle-dry
Moon-dry landscape,
****** on by goats.

The sun’s grinding rays
Scraped his eyes like brillo-pads
Week-old grease.
Pulling his hat down, he settled behind the tumbledown scree.
He adjusted the sights.
Across his outstretched legs lizards scurried.

The mortars fell like hiccups exploding from the gut.
The mortars tore up bodies throwing them before the wind.
The mortars cried burrowing through the air.

Who’s the soldier now my son,
Who has a gun?
**** beneath the leering sun-
Get out there and have some fun.


Darkness before midday-
Of mind and intent.
The mountains hold their own soulless
Secrets that only religion can shape-
The soldier who murders for religion
Is crueller than the soldier who murders for money.

He knew who to ****.
Not why. He knew *******
Not the reasons for refusing!
He slowly, quietly, pulled the trigger,
The bullet burst out whining across the crumbling landscape, its course pre-ordained, its end
As complete as death. Death was its end
In a soft cry of expiration.

No heaven met, no god examined, no concluding prayer, no final evaluation, no joy, no experience!
A dead man in the dust!
A dead man-dust to dust!

By dinner Dave had reached the camp again
Without much trouble.
He’d been spotted once by a woman washing clothes in a mountain stream, her eyes fixed upon him
For a moment, full of contempt.

A gun, my son, a gun
Have some fun,
With the gun, my son, the gun.
Pop, pop. Yet another gone!


“Got him with one shot. Well done,
Old son. Got him with a single shot.”
The colonel was full of praise. Downing a *****, he
Picked at the pineapple cube on his dish,
And crushed it between his busy fingers.
An intelligent man, but a soldier too,
A poet at times whose words clawed at his memories, paying pale homage.

“You are a marvel, young man.
Four this week. Well done.”
The overhead fan twirled noisily,
Clashing with his redundant pride,
Giving meaning to a pointless war
In a torrid land full of becalmed ideas and underlying prayer.

“I’ll write a commendation for you,
Young man. You deserve it.”
The colonel continued, basking on olives.
“Your skill with the gun
Is astonishing. You deal death like
Other’s write poems. You destroy
With a well-balanced phrase. There is beauty
In your honed and natural talent.”

Others slapped his back as he passed
Beaming with approval, lavish with praise,
Expressive with congratulation. At that point,
In that shell-tight room, he felt himself a hero
An Achilles, an Odysseus, a haunted Vietnam veteran.

When the wind broke, rivers sidled up the canyon walls
Immersed in the valley. The sun glowered
Scorching lungs.
  2.    
Scattered around the shattered jeeps
Expelled their contents-
Broken and dismembered.
Triggered mines exploded one by one
In hellish sequence,
Flames of cooked air
Tearing wantonly into flesh.
His rifle lay embedded in his hand.

Time, my son, time for fun
So pick up your gun
Pick up your gun and run
Time for fun!


The colonel wrote sadly
Of an incident sparing all ugly details,
Of those who died that day
In a minute of ****** confusion.
He spared the ugly details
Vividly describing heroic deaths in the wadi
Of men he’d known well.

The Officer’s Mess was silent-
No jokes were cracked, no backs,
Slapped, no congratulations expressed.
In contemplation the soldiers read, studied form, thought about their families,
Trying, even in solitude, not to die.
Outside the camp walls, demolished by the heat,
Caricatured by flies,
The child’s motionless body lay
The child dispatched by a ******’s clean bullet, slumbering
In the dirt.

*Leave the gun, my son, leave the gun,
You’ve had your fun!
Leave the gun, my son, leave the gun
Your short life’s work is done!
Stanley Wilkin Sep 2016
I watched the fox, rat held firmly in its jaw,
Trot across the street, lithely avoiding the cars,
Ears pricked up.

It slithered under a fence and weaved through the undergrowth,
Not once acknowledging my presence.
Disappearing in the night, it yelped out its echoes in the wood
Licking out worms.

The shadowed moon slung down its light
Like weak silver bristles from the back of a carved out hedgehog
Covered with newly deposited fox saliva.
It had screamed as it was consumed-unable to die!

The crow stabbed at a newly dead rock pigeon
As the stalking cat pounced......
Death mingled!

Joe, who lived near me, waved:
I waved back, wondering why he saw nothing.
Stanley Wilkin Sep 2016
Incandescent, the mystic sign burrowed into
Their untarnished consciousness
Depositing meaning where before,
In related specie, there’d been none. Ok,
At first it didn’t seem such a big thing but
Later, much later, it was.

Creating an object d’art is one thing
For a man wearing animal skins but an entire
Nation is another matter. It took time.
That said, going back seems like just another way
Of going forward.

Out of the encroaching sands crept a single idea
Made out of many others. A pyramid rose out of smaller
But more elegant definitions of power. The greater the power
The vaster the ****** pyramid became,
Enclosing space with a giant flat footstep. Khufu
Lay within, disintegrating slowly,
Convinced of his godlike nature-while minor royalty
Found cheaper ways of preserving body and soul.
Sand covered the Sphinx for two thousand years
Alexander’s body disappeared, Caesar, a manipulative bald
Headed coot ended up under a memorial stone,
Equally godlike and dead.  

Cleopatra may not have been hot after all
But having powerful lovers and dying gracefully
Did wonders for her profile. Long dead,
An icon of femininity and ****** allure, she lives
Forever in a world that desires both.
Quin **** Huangdi surrounded himself with lifelike soldiers
In a bid to recreate reality, as if
Death could be touched by an illusion. Surrounded
By a mercury lake, buttressed by an unmoving army
His bones are as empty in their fashion
As the peasants he ruled over. Can’t cheat it, or
Beat it. Can’t ignore it either.

The personality continues through
Memory aids. A huge gravestone serves as well-
As Khufu discovered. Deeds recorded in
Verse works, but in both methods
The myth becomes greater and the real person,
The one who cried at funerals, failed during ***,
Gets forgotten. Might just as well
Do nothing. It takes less energy, leading
To less disappointment.

The desire to extend privileges into death
Where nothing exists
Is the fantasy of the spoilt for whom life
Must be eternal. An Australian aborigine who
Rallied his people in overdue rebellion against
The European hordes bringing sheep and planting grass
Was killed, stuffed and displayed in an exhibition.
Khufu had himself stuffed and displayed. All famous people
Are stuffed in time and displayed like curios
Dying again and again throughout eternity.
Stanley Wilkin Sep 2016
I snatched at her soul,
grabbed it and held it to my chest,
a beatific grin upon my untruthful face
glorying in her spasmodic transmutation-
her monotone vision
beset with confusion
her gender breaking in my grip.

Loping footsteps over taut, troubled seas
spawned secretions ejected
like flame-
her sighs, a storm
her cries subsumed in sanctified fire
without worship.
soul, gender, grip
Next page