White Man! White Man!
You dare come and conquer this country?
This corner of the continent
Construct your castles with crystal windows
Looking out on a foaming sea
Model your marble walls, polished and pristine
On your porcelain teeth: terrible and tough
Paint clouds on the ceiling with paper fingers
Papyrus skin crumpling with age
Your knights galloped in on young geldings
Castrated to keep them clean
Like the sterile white cloths draped across their clavicles
You’d scar this landscape
With a squat whitewashed town
Matt and peeling
Dishevelled and overgrown

Black Man! Black Man!
You dare come and claim this country?
My corner of the continent
Behind boulders and barren hills
Coalfires choke the burned sky
I’m breathing in your smoke but at night
Your bullet-holes in the firmament glint
As stars glimpse the belching flame
Of your volcanic pride
Your bearded bishops bludgeoning
The bloodied populace of pockets of resistance
Scorched brown eyes smouldering
From here to the horizon
Of mournful ashen mountains, blunt and black
You’d build your walls of black onyx
Cold, hard and brutal

So let the battle-lines be drawn
Let us duel to the death until we mix
Into that emotional grey area between man and man:
Peace

That class is sponsoring a thorough bred fair—creating war winning story that doesn't fit neatly onto a bumper sticker. Only a standard reply from featherless wing—bloviating an appeal to the conscientious authority. Go back: polish the Augean non-staples, rear up stallions to break geldings, eat beefsteak, drink whiskey at whistle, stop. That class only teaches a Greek hero clean-up. Meanwhile, they claim victory.

The windows broken seals make whistling
bottle top noises in the ruckus, the seagulls
swarming like spiders in the back field,
the fat geldings hide by the hedges searching
for shelter. The fire roars and we sip hot whiskeys,
boys stroke their whiskers searching
for wisdom. Hum advertising jingles, hum
in agreement, wolf whistle at the young girls
in small skirts exploring something they call
"fun". Wonder if you remember what is was like.
The taste of brandy reminds me of something,
of a few things. Once I took a bottle to the head
of a boy that betrayed me, stinking of it,
and once my friend spit up like a baby,
milk of her alcoholic mother into my lap
in the back of a car. We're all so much older
and yet younger than we are.

O, golden chariot!
Look upon the geldings,
hear the locusts chirp in late evening;
O, golden chariot,
take me away!