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Does anyone remember when
Baseball fields were full
When you always saw a hundred kids
When you drove by every school
Pick-up games of baseball
On every field you'd pass
But now the only scrub that's there
Is just overgrown, clumpy grass

I drove on by a park today
One that I used to play baseball on
The backstop was all broken
And the dugouts, they were gone
The field was full of garbage
Weeds and echos of the past
I remembered times between the lines
With a long forgotten cast

"HEY MISTER...MOVE...WE'RE PLAYING HERE"
"CAN'T YOU MOVE SO WE CAN PLAY?"
"HEY BATTER, BATTER, SWING NOW BATTER"
"YOU'LL NOT GET A HIT TODAY"

I'd crossed into a baseball game
One from many years before
The ghosts of players long deceased
Were still playing here some more

I crossed back to the dugouts
Stepped behind and they were gone
But, as I stepped back to the old coaches box
I could hear their haunting song

"HEY BATTER, BATTER, BATTER, SWING"
"WE WANT A PITCHER, NOT A BELLYITCHER"
"HEY BATTER, BATTER, BATTER, SWING"
"WE WANT A PITCHER, NOT A BELLYITCHER"

I sat there watching the game take place
On a field not worth a ****
At least not in the present time
Then a kid hit a grand slam

He touched them all as he ran by
I saw it plain as day
The only thing I wished was that
I could join them and play

"HEY MISTER, STAND ON  HOME PLATE"
"THEN COME WALK OUT TO THE MOUND"
"WE KNOW YOU WANT TO JOIN US"
"WE KNOW IT'S HALLOWED GROUND"

I did the tasks directed
I joined the players from ago
And as I ran up to the rubber
I went as fast as I could go

I could feel myself get younger
I didn't know if it was real
But, they say as you get older
You're just as young as you may feel

I pitched two good strong innings
Then the echoes chose to fade
I knew it was just imagination
Of long lost players I had made

"COME BACK AGAIN TOMORROW"
"YOU CAN THROW THAT PELLET KID!"
"WE'VE GOT TO GET ON HOME NOW"
and...go back...you know I did!
After passing by so  many old vacant soccer and baseball fields, left overgrown and unused, that I used to play. I just dreamed that the children who once played there over the years, left some form of energy there, like the ghosts in a James Lumbers painting. I crossed the lines and the game was on...I'll be back again tomorrow, I have to ice my arm now.
MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.
Make a marching song of swinging arms and swinging legs,
        Going along,
        Going along,
On the roads from San Antonio to Athens, from Seattle to Bagdad-
The boys and men in winding lines of khaki, the circling squares of bayonet points.

Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki;
Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;
A million, ten million, singing, "I am ready."
This the sun looks on between two seaboards,
In the land of Lincoln, in the land of Grant and Lee.

I heard one say, "I am ready to be killed."
I heard another say, "I am ready to be killed."
O sunburned clear-eyed boys!
I stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns and bugles,
        You-and the flag!
And my heart tightens, a fist of something feels my throat
        When you go by,
You on the kaiser hunt, you and your faces saying, "I am ready to be killed."

They are hunting death,
Death for the one-armed mastoid kaiser.
They are after a Hohenzollern head:
There is no man-hunt of men remembered like this.

The four big brothers are out to ****.
France, Russia, Britain, America-
The four republics are sworn brothers to **** the kaiser.

Yes, this is the great man-hunt;
And the sun has never seen till now
Such a line of toothed and tusked man-killers,
In the blue of the upper sky,
In the green of the undersea,
In the red of winter dawns.
Eating to ****,
Sleeping to ****,
Asked by their mothers to ****,
Wished by four-fifths of the world to ****-
To cut the kaiser's throat,
To hack the kaiser's head,
To hang the kaiser on a high-horizon gibbet.

And is it nothing else than this?
Three times ten million men thirsting the blood
Of a half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings?
Three times ten million men asking the blood
Of a child born with his head wrong-shaped,
The blood of rotted kings in his veins?
If this were all, O God,
I would go to the far timbers
And look on the gray wolves
Tearing the throats of moose:
I would ask a wilder drunk of blood.

Look! It is four brothers in joined hands together.
        The people of bleeding France,
        The people of bleeding Russia,
        The people of Britain, the people of America-
These are the four brothers, these are the four republics.

At first I said it in anger as one who clenches his fist in wrath to fling his knuckles into the face of some one taunting;
Now I say it calmly as one who has thought it over and over again at night, among the mountains, by the seacombers in storm.
I say now, by God, only fighters to-day will save the world, nothing but fighters will keep alive the names of those who left red prints of bleeding feet at Valley Forge in Christmas snow.
On the cross of Jesus, the sword of Napoleon, the skull of Shakespeare, the pen of Tom Jefferson, the ashes of Abraham Lincoln, or any sign of the red and running life poured out by the mothers of the world,
By the God of morning glories climbing blue the doors of quiet homes, by the God of tall hollyhocks laughing glad to children in peaceful valleys, by the God of new mothers wishing peace to sit at windows nursing babies,
I swear only reckless men, ready to throw away their lives by hunger, deprivation, desperate clinging to a single purpose imperturbable and undaunted, men with the primitive guts of rebellion,
Only fighters gaunt with the red brand of labor's sorrow on their brows and labor's terrible pride in their blood, men with souls asking danger-only these will save and keep the four big brothers.

Good-night is the word, good-night to the kings, to the czars,
        Good-night to the kaiser.
The breakdown and the fade-away begins.
The shadow of a great broom, ready to sweep out the trash, is here.

One finger is raised that counts the czar,
The ghost who beckoned men who come no more-
The czar gone to the winds on God's great dustpan,
The czar a pinch of nothing,
The last of the gibbering Romanoffs.

Out and good-night-
The ghosts of the summer palaces
And the ghosts of the winter palaces!
Out and out, good-night to the kings, the czars, the kaisers.

Another finger will speak,
And the kaiser, the ghost who gestures a hundred million sleeping-waking ghosts,
The kaiser will go onto God's great dustpan-
The last of the gibbering Hohenzollerns.
Look! God pities this trash, God waits with a broom and a dustpan,
God knows a finger will speak and count them out.

It is written in the stars;
It is spoken on the walls;
It clicks in the fire-white zigzag of the Atlantic wireless;
It mutters in the bastions of thousand-mile continents;
It sings in a whistle on the midnight winds from Walla Walla to Mesopotamia:
Out and good-night.

The millions slow in khaki,
The millions learning Turkey in the Straw and John Brown's Body,
The millions remembering windrows of dead at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Spottsylvania Court House,
The millions dreaming of the morning star of Appomattox,
The millions easy and calm with guns and steel, planes and prows:
        There is a hammering, drumming hell to come.
        The killing gangs are on the way.

God takes one year for a job.
God takes ten years or a million.
God knows when a doom is written.
God knows this job will be done and the words spoken:
Out and good-night.
        The red tubes will run,
        And the great price be paid,
        And the homes empty,
        And the wives wishing,
        And the mothers wishing.

There is only one way now, only the way of the red tubes and the great price.

        Well...
Maybe the morning sun is a five-cent yellow balloon,
And the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy.
Maybe the mothers of the world,
And the life that pours from their torsal folds-
Maybe it's all a lie sworn by liars,
And a God with a cackling laughter says:
"I, the Almighty God,
I have made all this,
I have made it for kaisers, czars, and kings."

Three times ten million men say: No.
Three times ten million men say:
        God is a God of the People.
And the God who made the world
        And fixed the morning sun,
        And flung the evening stars,
        And shaped the baby hands of life,
This is the God of the Four Brothers;
This is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia;
This is the God of the people of Britain and America.

The graves from the Irish Sea to the Caucasus peaks are ten times a million.
The stubs and stumps of arms and legs, the eyesockets empty, the cripples, ten times a million.
The crimson thumb-print of this anathema is on the door panels of a hundred million homes.
Cows gone, mothers on sick-beds, children cry a hunger and no milk comes in the noon-time or at night.
The death-yells of it all, the torn throats of men in ditches calling for water, the shadows and the hacking lungs in dugouts, the steel paws that clutch and squeeze a scarlet drain day by day-the storm of it is hell.
But look! child! the storm is blowing for a clean air.

Look! the four brothers march
And hurl their big shoulders
And swear the job shall be done.

Out of the wild finger-writing north and south, east and west, over the blood-crossed, blood-dusty ball of earth,
Out of it all a God who knows is sweeping clean,
Out of it all a God who sees and pierces through, is breaking and cleaning out an old thousand years, is making ready for a new thousand years.
The four brothers shall be five and more.

Under the chimneys of the winter time the children of the world shall sing new songs.
Among the rocking restless cradles the mothers of the world shall sing new sleepy-time songs.
Generations pass as autonomy eludes us denying us the opportunity
to reach for liberality.
Indifference, being a predecessor, digs shallow graves in so many ways,
Watching heritage that once was become something uncanny,
Unrecognizably lingering; lifeless.

Racial force fields, forces fields of incarcerated thoughts to take root,
Keeping us from seeing beyond ourselves,
and
The barriers built to keep those out,
only keep us,
from letting us, to allow others in,
and trust is placed on trial,
looking at a life sentence of death, unaware of its opportunity
to freely avail or elude it’s predicament.
If only it would appeal to the counsel of the majority.

Stubbornness sometimes refuses to embrace what we know needs to
be confronted in order to bring about change,
unifying an outside world
where life is not always fair and those around us calculate thoughts to hinder our progression.

We live in a place of democracy and disdain where street corner pharmaceuticals
****** the weary,
where adolescent girls are forced to become
teenage mothers or prostitutes,
where empty baseball diamonds and dugouts
are replaced by thick scaling barb wired walls and gray barred cells,
where young men and women trade their age multiplied for the number they will where in a system for life, and
where the sound of a crying disappointed child is exchanged for anger and abuse,
in the absence of a father or mother figure,
figuratively disfigured and lost in translation;
an abandonment of generations past.

Who will lead and guide us?
Who will plead and advocate on our behalf?
Who will stand in the gap?
Who will lead us past the captive mind to captivate hearts?
Who will provide the keys to unlock and break us free?
Free from the broken barriers that divide us?
~
Samantha Jan 2014
your daughter is infected;
writhing as she sleeps in too-thin-skin,
afraid the already permeable peach might catch,
impaled by some night terror
inching out under her eardrums and eyelids.
any other orifice blackened with rot,
and skin crawling with creeping creatures, cutting comfortable
dugouts and sleeping quarters in her heels,
beginning to pull and tear as
one-by-one pests patrolled her leg bones.
cauldron of guts, blood, oil, trouble and toil,
stirred to churn, to gurgle;
Out from up her hip bones the maggots marched,
All her demons expurgated,
Slithering out and flicking forked tails,
Winking kisses with blind eyes
Mara Siegel Aug 2015
i always came over wearing silver and black
and you always wore something purple and insisted it be noticed
even if it wasn't noticeable

but i didn't care.

i used to date boys who cried wolf and kissed poorly
******* in dugouts
high holiday hook ups and lackluster dates

but i don't care.

you bruised my ***** bone
and ego
and surprisingly, my heart

but i hardly care.

or, at least, that's what i keep insisting.
i stopped dating poets when i realized it was more convenient to let them be my material, and not theirs.
Jesse Bourque Aug 2010
A rumbling,
Echoes across the shattered wasteland
Acid snow drifts in the caustic air
Past my helmet visor.

My gas filter rattles
As I **** in the foul air,
The next wave is coming
Great war machines,
Chugging slowly toward our battered dugouts.

And for what?
A body of unpolluted water
Barely wide enough to step over,
Or a tiny stretch of untainted farmland.

I sit in my ramshackle bunker
With my comrades,
Checking my rifle one last time,
Knowing in my heart, that we
Can't push back the next assault.

I sit silently cursing my ancestors,
For leaving me this god-forsaken legacy
For shattering my Earth.

As the first shells start to fall.
Just a sad vignette from our looming apocalyptic future.

(c) Jesse Bourque
broken Jan 2016
him
you were just a baseball player with green eyes who went to church on Sunday but the thing is that you don't know from the beginning who is important in your life and who will just be a background character. you stole my heart on a Friday and tore it to pieces on a Saturday only to arrive at church bright and early on Sunday morning with a new ******* your arm. you'd give her a silver cross necklace and a hand to hold and tell her that you had never taken anyone to church before even though my pink flower earring is still under the third pew. you would take her to the abandoned park across the street after the service and spill to her the sob story that is your childhood until you have her almost in tears for you. then after her pity for your sadness is planted in her mind like a poison, you'll tell her it's okay and you're fine and you'll lean in real close, so close that she can smell the cologne that you got for Christmas last year. you'll whisper in her vulnerable ears that there has never been anyone like her and that if she can just save her soul from the evil people of the world, society will be blessed with it one day. you will tell her tales of girls with fangs for teeth who tore out your heart valves and of parents with strong hands and angry words. her eyes will grow wide as you spin the paragraphs with memories of lonely and dark nights where you almost jumped off of that ledge your mind put you on. then you'll lean away from that young girl's ear and you'll look in her eyes and tell her that you didn't jump and you're okay and it's okay. but it's not, is it? that's what she thinks, and you know it. you seem vulnerable, but strong and brave to defend her from all of the toxic waste the world holds. but what this girl, with bright blue eyes and a soul with barely any scratches doesn't understand, is that you are the demons you talk about. maybe once upon a time, in another world, on another street, you were a normal little boy with big dreams and a lunchbox your mother left notes in. but somehow that little boy went away and was replaced by the shadows that lingered under his bed and in the corners of his room painted in blue. the boy with the hot wheels cars turned into a heartbreaker in a baseball cap that didn't care about anybody but the person he saw in the mirror. you'll tell her that her dress looks pretty and you'll go on and on about pointless little things that will make her fall for you. your tongue will wind around syllables that tell her about how you love kids and your favorite food is Oreos and you hit your first home run when you were five. her eyes will see hearts and her innocent little heart will break into pieces for the boy she thinks you are. her clean and new soul will now have cracks and bruises, but it's okay, because she thinks you'll actually stick around long enough to help her heal them. her mind will listen to your heartbreak stories as you sit in the sand of that old park, and she'll mess with that necklace because she realizes that all of these girls who tore you apart are prettier than she thinks she'll ever be. but you already know this. you planned on it. picking out the nicest and most self secure girl with big doe eyes and watching her break down piece by piece, as she continues to think you're a god. it's a game and you always win, no matter what the cards are. this girl will go home and wonder about you and stress herself inside out trying to think of how she can fix the boy with the hole in his heart as you load your gun to put bullets in hers. you'll talk to her all night with sugar on your lips about your favorite constellations and you'll slip in that you ran away once, mentioning it for long enough that she feels your pain, but for such a short second, that she feels shut out. you'll shriek into the receiver in the middle of the night telling her that someone broke into your house to crush your essence but you'll lock all of the doors and windows before she even gets to your gravel road. go ahead and repeat your patterns so that I can sit from the sidelines as it passes by like clouds on a stormy day. show her that you're bleeding inside and your lungs have been punctured and bandage them the next day as if it never happened at all just so she feels the right amount of hopeless. give her the key to everything you've ever been and will be but change the locks the day after. whisper names of loved ones you've lost and tell her of your past as her lips brush yours and make her feel everything you hold like an anchor dragging her down. show her the trees you climbed as a child only to finish by mentioning that you broke your leg in the fall from it's branches. kiss her in September and drop her October because things like that are easy. she'll sit in her room at night six months later wondering why she never passed the test and why someone so sweet would throw her away like that. she'll spin your phrases and quotes in her mind instead of sleeping until she's utterly convinced that it was entirely her fault. she'll write in her notebooks about the perfection that is you and the disaster of her that ruined any chances she had. every time you pass by she will be absolutely tortured with the want to run up to you and scream until all of her organs fail. maybe after a year, she'll finally get you sat in front of her again on a cafeteria stage and you'll spit up every blood soaked lie you can manage. apologies and random nothings will climb up your throat like parasites, leaking into her and latching onto her bone marrow until they drain her dry. she'll laugh with you once again and it'll feel like heaven to her when it's really all a dysfunctional daydream, and as soon as you leave, so will the color from her cheeks. maybe eight months after that she'll start to forget that you ever existed, and she'll finally be able to see dugouts the same way again. but you can sense it. like an animal that can smell fear miles away, you'll come right back and only stay long enough for her to question everything she knows again, then you'll vanish. you can't handle not being in someone's nightmares and dreams, it feeds the fire where your heart was supposed to be. from now on, she always fixes her makeup to try to look like those girls you used to talk about. she always tapes her eyelids shut at night so that maybe she won't see your face. no one with green eyes will look exactly the same, and she hasn't attended a baseball game without thinking of you. her hair will always be brushed, covering her ears so that no one can whisper any lies into her thoughts. but it's all her fault, because after all, you were just a baseball player with green eyes who went to church on Sunday.
In the dugout
Bases are loaded
he's up to bat
he swings and it's
a line drive up third.

Then it's first base
second base
third base
and sliding into home.

Afterwards I am amazed
at the trash and litter that abounds
that humans can do this to a place
it astounds.

In my disgust I look up
there you are still glowing from
the play,
looking at me as if to say
your next.

We walk a while
we talk a while
I learn about the game
I need a chair
the dugouts there

An awkward pet
my ******* wet
he lays me back on the bench

he rubs me there
hasn't a care
of when or where i've been
just drops his pants
and starts the dance
of an innocents last chance.

Pushing the wall with his toes,
helps it to get where it goes good again
poking my eye with his nose
its over as awkward as it began

He goes in a rush
leaves me in a flush
wondering what it was all about
left all alone with sorrow
the soreness will be better tomorrow
I'll try not to pout
and in PE dress out
A short take on a ****** encounter of the elementary  school kind.
David Betten Nov 2016
MOTECUHZOMA
            If, past this moment, you persist in lies,
            Know I shall bury you beneath my halls,
            Pull down your house till sludge seeps through the planks,
            And wipe your family name from off the earth,
            Yea, to the unborn fragments in the womb.
            Now, wouldn’t you recant this little fib?

FISHERMAN
            Forgive me lord, but what I tell is truth.

TLACAELEL
            Most like it is.

MOTECUHZOMA             Then know, you brave, bold slave,
            These spectral archipelagos you saw,
            Were giantlike canoes, with alien crew.
                                        He gestures to a servant, who produces a trunk.
            One year ago, the waves cast up this trunk
            Of jewels, foreign frocks, and silver swords:
            Most like, the precious jetsam of this launch.

FISHERMAN
            May my aviso aid your eminence.

MOTECUHZOMA
            One see him nobly boarded in our suites.
                                                                  Exit Servant with the Fisherman.

                                       Enter a Majordomo.
                    
TLACAELEL
            Well, watch, where are your hocus-pocus wards?

MAJORDOMO          My lord, command that I be cut to pieces or whatever you wish, for you should know that when I reached the cell, there was no one there. I had my best sentries there, trustworthy men I’ve known for years, but none of them heard the sorcerers escape.

TLACAELEL
            Then how, pray tell me, have they flown the coop?

MAJORDOMO
            Perhaps they flapped away.

TLACAELEL                                       What, gallows-meat?
          
MAJORDOMO        They can sprinkle themselves with fern-spores, and
shimmer into invisibility.

TLACAELEL
            Buzz, buzz! These twice-told tales upend my trust.
            Rope’s end-

MOTECUHZOMA          No. Suffer him.

TLACAELEL                                             As you see fit.

MOTECUHZOMA
            Some say such wizards take wing every night,
            And soar unto the fringes of the earth.

TLACAELEL
            His majesty’s broad magnanimity
            Has spared you this time, turnkey, but repair.
            Not all wards will be such skilled hide-and-seeks.

MOTECUHZOMA
            Now: Torch the hovels of their families,
            And witness if those new lighthouses’ beacons
            Will call their wandering rooks home to re-roost.
                                                                                     Exit Majordomo.
TLACAELEL
            And what of these vast dugouts?

MOTECUHZOMA                                        Time will tell.
            Our steward Teuhtlilli eastward creeps,
            To see what tricks are offered from the deeps.             *They exit.
From my play in verse, thefloralwar.com
Wk kortas Jul 2020
It is, in its own fashion, a ballpark—there are dugouts,
(Though more kin to lean-tos if the truth be told)
A fence with advertisements, though its paint is cracked and faded,
And some of those firms testifying
To being tops in collars and canned foods
Have long since changed names or flat-out gone under,
But a ballpark nonetheless, and if you squint your eyes
Or find some other convenient method of self-delusion,
You can convince yourself it is a rather fine thing,
Happily oblivious to the fact that the infield
Is all bumps and tiny moraines
Covered with crownvetch and chickweed masquerading as grass,
The outfield rife with bark scorpions
Who frequently wander inside the lines.
Milling about this somewhat-short-of-pastoral greenish patch,
Wearing uniforms of a reasonable homogeny,
Is a curious, potentially combustible group of men:
Honest-to-goodness big leaguers whose off-field proclivities
Led Judge Landis to excuse them further participation,
Rope-muscled miners from Bisbee,
Carbide-lamp helmets tucked under their arms,
Callow boys taking a chance on this decidedly last-chance town,
One or two others with tangibly acute reasons
For staying in close proximity to the Mexican border.
Holding court in the midst of this collection
Is a man whose face was not visited by the smallpox
As much as it was wrapped up in its full embrace;
It’s old Charlie Comiskey who should be in jail, he grumbles
Man has more money’n he’ll ever need,
Hell, more than Stoneham or Ruppert.
No reason in the world he couldn’t pay his boys a fair wage,
But he treated ‘em like dogs, and if you starve it long enough,
Why, even the most loyal dog will turn on a man,
Ain’t that right boys
?, and a pair of his listeners,
Men named Chick and Swede
Who know of Comiskey’s parsimony first-hand,
Grimly nod their heads in agreement.
The speaker pauses for a moment, and as he does
He produces, seemingly from nowhere, a hip flask
(Brought forth like a seasoned magician
Pulling flowers from some gauzy handkerchief,
Or a card sharp finding an extra king in the very air itself)
And takes a long draught before continuing.
Look, I love this game--hell, no man loves it more
But it’s still just a **** game,
Just entertainment, like a circus or a rodeo.
Maybe we a took a few liberties with a game here and there,
But, you know, I knew folks who’d see the same Broadway show
Three, maybe even four times;
They knew how it would turn out, I reckon,
But it didn’t keep them from spending four bucks a ticket.
Well, what’s a ballplayer but an entertainer?
We still put on a good show, and no one gets hurt,
But because it’s a ballgame, you’d think we’d spit on the cross
.
With this, the circle breaks up, and men head to spots on the field
To field lazy fungoes and toss the ball around the infield,
And most of the on-lookers soon head back toward town
(Perhaps back to work at one of the smelters,
Their stacks blowing forlorn clouds into otherwise endless skies,
Or maybe to one of the sad houses on the far side of town
Where haunted-eyed Mexican ****** mechanically light candles
In supplication to saints whose efficacy they’ve come to doubt)
But the stragglers who stay behind are treated to the first baseman
Make a marvelous, almost magical, pickup of a short-hop throw
With the easy nonchalant brilliance which at one time
Brought hundreds, no thousands, of men to their feet in disbelief,
And as he sweeps his glove upward, he laughs
(Though with just a touch of restraint, a trace of the rehearsed)
And says See, boys? Once you are big league,
You are always big league
.
alifeissixtofiveunlessyoujiggletheodds
Traveler Jun 4
War is war
destruction and death!
Peace is peaceful
You can feel it
in your every step

Living in dugouts
Shell shocked retreats
Waiting for no more
then a certain defeat

Who deserves
to experience hell
upon this earth
where we all dwell?

Shall we pretend
and close our eyes
as the west continues
to sell their lies?

Peace is simple
beneath the covers
We just stop killing
each-other!
Traveler 🧳 Tim
Traveler Aug 27
Lets pretend
There's no wars going on at this very moment
Hell let just write about beautiful things that make us happy
Those people hiding in foxholes and dugouts are not real
Ukrainian conscripts and dead Palestinians children...
All conspiracy theories, go back to dinner.
Why would we lose sleep?
Lets pretend and forget about being free.
Traveler Tim

Relax we can keep funding evil with our tax money.
A labyrinth to get lost in
a whirlpool to be tossed in
a mind that's used to wandering,
terrors I make for myself.

On this way out in
where the end is to begin
the middle is a no man's land

Foxholes and dugouts
hidey holes for weary souls
terrors I make for myself.

In the comfort of carriage
91063
I could be safe
secure
sure I could
but
look at them as I see them
and you'll see
sleeping bogeymen
terrors I make for myself.

Exit to Oxford street
to daylight where you wil meet
vagabonds and beggars,
it staggers me to see
so much poverty
on the streets paved with gold.

Turn a page and you age
disgracefully or not,
this book is the only book
you've got

Read it twice.
Flanders

In the dawn over Flanders
Wounded horses move no more
And dead soldiers look small.
The stillness is fragile beautiful.

Soldiers in dugouts smoke
Eat from cans
Waits for another the fighting
To commence.

God sighs deeply
He had given us a free will
He had been rash
Regrets his frivolities.

— The End —