If war, you're telling me, is what makes a
man a man
and that you can dig out my insides and
replace the good with automatic unfeeling-
reprogrammed to see no shadows and no
gray just the blinding light of some lairs
justice winding my spring and setting me
marching to the rat-a-tat-tat of bugles bleating
and you can then see fit to wonder why I
might one day come apart as splintered wood
and scream banshee curses and beat on some innocent
flesh with nothing in my empty head but the
nightmare visions and devil's rewind and all the
pox of all the horror you have made me do and
see, the ****** beast you have made of me:
then mister I have to tell you I want no part of that
If war, you're telling me, is what makes a
man a man
and that staring into the flesh torn face
of the stranger you told me is my brother
as my hands claw frantically to wipe away
the blood that spurts greedily from his neck
ripped open by stray debris scattered uncaring
into the wind and that I am meant to hear as well,
hear his foul frothing lips as the weary white
of terror drifts across his eyes and he flops
terribly trying to offer just one more **** word into
this ugly world with the sky turning red above
the both of us and the smoke as thick as carnivals
then mister I have to tell you I want no part of that
If war, you're telling me, is what makes a
man a man
and that I should with echoing voice rejoice
seeing in flashing images of that ephemeral
gaudy green the distant explosions from oblivious
machines and with each shredding salvo should
whoop and holler and not dare think what those streets
must be like, or the limbs in the debris or the searing
heat of the fire as it spreads hungrily from building to
building (office to office, home to home, who knows)
a feeding frenzy that should seem unreal, on a busy night
for Azreal, but since it is something far away I am meant
to be glad for it, and exalt the far off victim's torment
then mister I have to tell you I want no part of that
If war, you're telling me, is what makes a
man a man
and that a man I have never met who had the
misfortune of being born in his country rather
than the misfortune of being born in mine is
my enemy, is my demon defiled, is my foe and
that coming face to face I shouldn't think of his
mother/father/sister/brother/lovers crying just
like mine must be, but should instead see only
the ignorant rage flush his face and feel the cold
knotting of insensible hatred inside my chest should throw
myself on him a dervish of murderous limbs and
mercilessly pound the very breath from him and
smile all the while for having done it with the blood
still splattered on my face like a criminal's Rorschach
then mister I have to tell you I want no part of that
If war is what makes a man a man then god be ****** if it
isn't what breaks a man too, and filling our heads with
tripe and flags and marching bands doesn't change
the fact that I would be made a monster and the stink
of gore and sorrow untold would never wash from
my hands but would follow me to the end of my days
and it would be the last thing my mind would see before the black,
the stench then buried with me in my grave would rise
above the close cut grass, me just one in an ever reaching
row of crosses all done up in white-
not red or black or blue or green or any ****
color you told us mattered, that you sent us to
our deaths under with those colors flapping ahead
of us in the wind and pounding their venom in
our ears no **** color at all just:
white.
Which is all the colors mister,
all of them at all at once in fact.
Mister, I'll have no part in that.
