Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
AP Staunton Feb 2016
In B and B flop-houses, poems I wrote,
Stuffed into damp pockets, of a Donkey-Jacket coat.
Poems about building-sites and too much beer,
Being far from home, despair and fear.
I read them to comrades, who all nodded their heads,
Then went back to sleep, in one room with eight beds.
I read them to lads, who for the first time,
Sat and listened, to words, their rhythm and rhyme.

Folkestone, Dover, Hastings, Brighton and Hove,
I wrote poems, by the light of a Camping Gaz stove,
Describing MY feelings, MY way of life,
Cut straight to the bone, like a Stanley Craft Knife.
The Channel Tunnel, dumpers and cranes,
Concrete burns, bruises, hangovers. . .shame.
Days without eating, nights full of drinking,
Hours on a Shovel, digging without thinking.

Then along came the books, I started reading at night,
Discovered Jack London, by wind-up torchlight.
I read more and more, captivated by books charms,
As my work-mates pursued , bar-maids down the Kings Arms.

Then one day, McNamara, with his belly full of beer,
Came looking for me, called me a queer.
". . .Reading and writing ??? Its NOT for the likes of us. . ."
I agreed begrudgingly, with this. . .. back-end of a bus.
He helped me gather up, my words and my books,
Into a couple of barrows, like scrap-metal crooks,
And wheeled them over, to where we burned the pallets,
Electric cable(for the copper)and broken slab-laying mallets.
They went on the embers, which began to ignite,
And from my caravan window, I watched them burn through the night.
As they glowed, I felt pity, not anger,
At the ****** ignorance, of this eighteen stone Ganger,
Who believed words were impotent, compared to the fist,
Our lives were mapped out, digging trenches, getting ******.

But the books had given me hope, that life was for living,
Not dying at Sixty, when your body just gives in,
Knees knackered, back broken, knuckles dead with rheumatics,
From working in all weathers, holding hammers, pneumatic.

Days later, on a Porta-Loo, McNamara settled down,
With a copy of ******* and a hard-on to pound.
He never smelled the petrol, mesmerised by *******
And pleasured himself, quickly, across the bottom of his vest.
Sparked up a rollie, relieved and relaxed,
Thinking of Fridays time-sheets to be faxed.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM !!!!!

We heard the explosion, looked to the sky,
Saw Doctor Who 's Tardis go flying by.
But it wasn't a Time Lord, just a burning box,
With a melting Eighteen stone Ganger, still holding his ****.
McNamara, was identified by the fillings in his teeth,
And buried, by the Council, just outside Haywards Heath.
If I hadn't continued writing, McNamaras threats, defied
No-one would know about him, or the way that he died.

Books and words are everything, they lift the mind
and they raise the anchor,
And they let me tell your tale, McNamara. . . .
How you lived and died. . .a ******.
Poetry is for everyone, not just a select few.
Robert G Page Jul 2014
The Slow-Bullet
by rgpage

In the early days of  Viet Nam
the American draft was going strong.
Young men in their prime of life,
were forced and herded into world strife.

A generation of America’s best, were
then brought home and laid to rest.
Wall Street smiled, the money flowed
the “fat Cats” called it money owed.

In towns and cities big and small,
families waited, worried, and cried.
Groups appeared, dissention grew.
"Mothers grab your son’s and hide."

There were those who felt their duty strong,
to take the leap toward blood and strife
with McNamara herding them along.
Known to the grunts as “Mac the Knife.”

The madness grew to a global scale
with those that were for and those against.
In bombing, selective targets became the norm
keeping the rest of the world from harm.

With those who didn’t feel their duty strong,
a path to the north they took.
They packed what they could, burned their cards
and paused for one last look.

With this some parents felt relief,
while others felt the disgrace. Of  seeing
the grief so many went through after
having their futures erased.

The war took over 58,000 American lives;
men and women both, (before we flew away).
Wall Street got their wages for blood, with
broken lives in pain, many thousands more would pay.

With thousands more that were yet to be lost, after returning home.
Physically and mentally scarred, even those seeming
perfectly whole. Then saying good-by to the ones they loved
in their own special way. They stoically waited for the slow-bullet to come to finally take them away…



Suicide has taken 3 or 4 times the lives than the war took. My heart cries for every last one of them…Robert G. Page, Viet Nam Vet. ‘66-’67.
Tyler King Apr 2016
When you think of learning to forgive yourself, think of Robert Strange McNamara
With the blood of a nation orphaned soaking into the creases of his suit, the stains that linger and the ghosts that weep, while the whole world watched his guilt manifest on television screens over dinner,
Think of yourself as the hawk of war, all the battles you fought before you realized you had more to lose than you ever could've imagined
Think of yourself as the navigator and the grand destiny you hoped to steer yourself towards,
Think of all those you had to destroy to get where you are now
Let them keep you up nights,
Let them haunt your dreams,
Learn to live with yourself, however you can
hi dudes and dudettes and welcome to Saturn club rings, where we are celebrating

the life of peter macnamara who was a famous aussie tennis player, and my nanna jean allan

whose new earth body is Aydan Calafiore, who was a great singer on the voice, anyhow his last life jean alan was a great

tennis fan and i have jean allan with me now to welcome peter to the afterlife

as we bring him to helping the world in his next life and here is slim dusty to start the welcoming party

slim

hi everyone and welcome to the great tennis player peter macnamara, here is this little piece

oh yeah, i would love to have a beer with peter

his backhand was pretty ace

and now this great player joins us in outta space

he joined up with mcnamee in doubles oh yeah

and in 1982 he was number 3 in the world

in 1980 he made it good in our grand slams

winning aussie open in 1979

and then won wimbledon in 1980 and 1982

and now, i want to see if he could carry his love for tennis or whatever to the kids of today

is he going to a future pro, like he coached a lot of greats

and hoping in his next life, he can inherit his great tennis styles

he is now the greatest, welcome to Saturn as perform this show, WELCOME peter to the great show

and now as yo look over our greats, what are you going to do

celebrate your life dude, here is jean who was your great fan


and now here is jean to read a poem, to say WELCOME

jean’s poem

welcome pete welcome pete

it will be great to see you here

your backhand and your coaching skills

really showed us how to play

i didn’t see the earth as jean this century

but i saw a lot of you

you made me want to sit on my couch watch the tennis and enjoy it yeseree

congratulations to peter, you were the greatest, yes you were

i saw players you beat, and players who you lost too

yes, and you were great

as i sat closing my legs on my couch

i loved to see you play

and i have reincarnated into a very talented kid

i think you will as well

whether you will play tennis, or anything else you see


congratulations mcnamara you were the best i can see

we have a few great future players, and australia hasn’t very many good men

but ash barty is playing well for the women, maybe your spirit can help you through

aussie aussie aussie oi oi oi

i hope you will be happy in your future lives, i know i am
Gary L Misch May 2014
We pay homage
To you,
Dear Bob,
Not as misguided,
But as pure evil.
A man brilliant
Enough,
To realize he was
Wrong,
But lie,
While trying to
Understand
Why
His numbers,
Inexplicably,
Did not
Work out,
While boys died.
Not everyone
Can use teenagers
To keep time,
But you did.

Couldn't you tell,
That your data
Were
Junk?
You could command
People to
Collect,
They laughed while
They presented
You crap.
If your models
Could have talked,
They would have
Laughed,
At you.

Reporters,
For whom
Everything is new,
Were sure
That you brought
Systems analysis,
To the
Puzzle Palace.
I guess they missed
World War Two.
You did ensure
It was used,
To build
Many,
Bad,
Weapons.
You get 'A'
For effort,
Professor.

Those dead soldiers' Moms
Applaud you.
They hope to
Meet you in hell,
For another go round.
You somehow thought,
That all of life,
Could be reduced
Numerically.
How bizarre.

In the end,
Your failure
Was not numerical,
But
Philosophical,
Your calibrated responses,
Moved
Not one enemy heart,
As for yours,
You had none.

Those attempting to
Tell you that
You were
Mistaken,
Were helpless,
They might as well,
Have been speaking
Sanskrit to you.
For they spoke in terms of
Morality,
of which
You had none.


When you passed,
No one
mourned,
And
As hard as you
Had tried to buy it,
No one,
Gave you,
Forgiveness.
John F McCullagh Aug 2018
Uncle Sam sat down across from me and placed his satchel on the floor.
It was time to pay the piper; that is God’s immutable law.
I tapped my bony finger, impatient to begin.
“That will be fifty eight thousand, Sam, starting with Tonkin.”

From his satchel, that seemed bottomless, Sam produced the cash.
“Start counting!” I demanded, as I drooled over his stash.
He started pilling Franklins up on the table there between us.
Each “C” note meant one hundred dead Due to McNamara’s genius.

Fathers and sons had fallen; young men by the score.
Just think of the girls they never kissed; the children they never saw.
Uncle Sam doled out the bills until his thumbs were sore
When he finished I took out my Scythe and swept them on the floor.

I saw Sam’s look of horror at my eyeless, nose less face.
He had counted out a treasure that he knew he can't replace.
“It was a Pleasure doing business.” Oh, how I despised that man!
Still I was certain that we’d meet often,even after Vietnam.
58,220 American men and women, my fellow boomers, died during the years of the Vietnam war. Here I imagine Uncle Sam settling the bill with an unusual accountant.
Sam Temple Apr 2016
Hope Patton Oswald doesn’t **** himself now………


…….he gots kids!
Patton Oswald is one of the finest comedians around, often his bits touch on depression.....he lost his wife yesterday.
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2016
did we know that today
in 2016 we'd be reading the future
about the Great American
soft
depression interlaced
August 16 with Lehman
Goldman
Sach King David
how this time it will be
different but the bubble
starting
in 1995 always burst
even if its only two years
later Elizabeth Montgomery
died we were joining the Academic Mafia
around Circle Drive
Korean BBQ
Blues Caravan and
cruising around East Los
in a Blue Toyota pickup truck
now
there's a parked Prius
because we're too busy
running
numbers a racket
in Cambridge that leaves us
just a bit of fried egg in the morning
with coffee vorleser-ing and documenting
just
as any moral Hannah would do
in 1939 to say hey this is the way
we wanted right boxcars leading
to abattoirs today we do our best
imitation
of a weak McNamara
mea culpa
Geno Cattouse Oct 2013
I got that letter this morning it was no surprise to me
All hands on deck.
Boot camp in three weeks. get your ducks lined up. Charlie has a bullet for me.Maybe a bouncing Betty or two.

Camp Lejeune. Jar  head central.
Drop yer ***** and grab yer socks ...Gonna get my mind right for the fight.

So. Face down in this Paddy. Buffalo crap. ******* lite.
Locked and loaded.Gonna die today I think.My number's about to play.
Mr Charlie on home turf. Incoming is whistling me a lullaby.

So tell me again why I gotta be here?
Down for the di di. Goin the other way.

V.C. can see me but I cant triangulate.
Little guy in black pajamas. Fighting for their wives kids and mamas.
Need to dig in. gotta move.

Boom.  

six  O clock news . Mr Cronkite singing the body bag blues.
Old McNamara just upped the ante.
Mothers dont let yer babies grow up to be cowboys.
TOD HOWARD HAWKS Jul 2020
Today is July 4, 2020. There is not much to celebrate. **** Trump leaves us in a Polynicean gloom. Fireworks remind me of wars. I would rather, and therefore will,  listen to Rachmaninov's PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 tonight.
I will celebrate beauty rather than killing. And I will give thought to Antigone as well, for she willingly gave her life for doing what was right. I shall listen to Yuja **** arpeggiate notes. I will again become fixated both by her light-
ning dexterity and the glorious sounds to which she gives birth. Humankind has this dual potential:  it can either **** or care. So why, I ask myself, does it always choose the former? On this national holiday especially, why do we now not celebrate Thomas Paine and Walt Whitman and Harriet Tubman and Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King Jr.? We do we not collectively ask forgiveness for all the covert, sinister, malevolent interventions into the affairs of other nations, resulting in unjust overthrows and war crimes aplenty? Fireworks? July 4th? We did defeat the evil of ****** and his unspeakable genocide. Let us be sure to give unending thanks to all those who lost their lives in this moral victory. But Viet Nam? The lives of 58,000 American soldiers lost for the lies of our leaders? And Kissinger and McNamara and the Bushes and Cheney and so many others in our government never held accountable for their war crimes? And yet tonight we have fireworks instead of Nuremberg-like trials. Antigone knew she would die if she buried her brother, Polynices, and yet she went ahead and buried him and died for doing it. And the 4,000,000 blacks who were slaves in 1861 and the 500 indigenous nations that covered for centuries from sea to shining sea what we now call America--did they have anything to celebrate on this day, on this date? Fireworks, that's all.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet, a novelist, and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.
Ken Pepiton Apr 2022
Camping,
we discuss the stars.
Augustine's thesis depicts the history
of the world as universal warfare
between God and the Devil.

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheCityof_God>

And my mentor,
once Balaam's talkin'assets warning vision,
bids me recall fools rushing in, where angels fear
to tread, eh, see the banner,
- agape. slack-jaw. Awe-some neighbor's flag
do not tread on me, I am already sliced to bits.
-it seems to me… to say, don't you read history?

Believe me, it was the mob, the mob maddened me,
yes, it did, it did, I think I may recall it did seem

they scorned the exposure,
when the curtain parted and the secret obsession,
became magnificent, if you can imagine
the torment of the unbelievers who must know,
now, how could there be unbelievers in hell, hell
one must imagine,
go look for reason to bring to the table

in the peace talks, McNamara was asked if
he read history, at all, had he never read
how this mind in agreement to be we,
the people who take life from
and give care to this land.
We remained free.
The land was taken, not our story.
Given to us by our ancestors, who taught us
the middle way, we win a war by fighting least.
True,
and lying least, being open, fishing in murky ponds
with lemon shaped frag grenades, the new kind.
plenty dead fish,

ten bucks a pop.
and there are those who swear
by these, a chosen weapon
for a wise man duel,

Elijah, drench the would, watch what we heard happens.

It was super-natural, no lie, but in this realm of words,
the burning in the bosum heated seven times hotter than wont

the image in the made up mind, said nothing,


The depths of not knowing, Kerouac,
had Moriarity, playing the role Ken Kingman,
plays in today's excursion into the wonder years.

I can decide I have the whole cast in mind,
people I grew up with, became the thing I was,
a being born to roam this earth's barren places,
picking up pieces of all that has been held in tales.

Intuitive knowing, often linked to a so-called gut
reaction, as when one is dared to dive into water,
which may or may not be deep,
plan for shallow, be ready for deep. And
dive, don't jump.

Jumpers believe, down deep, this dive-- blah,

no flow, so so slow, some secret sauce missing,
some means to an end in sight, some next
we land on our feet and, it is us, once more,

the year after Vietnam, when the war was still going,
but my part was done, I had been trained and rebrained.

Fitted with a military mind that found comfort,
in polishing boot toes and buckle brass, any brass really,

I once used four standard footlocker sized cans of Brasso,
to prepare a big brass bed for sale at the Alamo Thriftshop,
in Hollywood, on Vine, west side,
across from Hollywood Ranch Market, and the White Castle.

Burnished brass, is a beauty I find richer than Gold,
for many reasons I may put forth, conatus, new big idea
word containing sense of something at the core, more
than noise, meaning, yes, meaning
Spinoza used, and I may judge its use, once he defines his term.

What is the meaning of me, relative to the words in books,
billions searchable, by me, using tools I watched evolve,
always, sense first sence of sets in theories, kindness,
likeness, aspects, as seen clearly---

this is that, return of the king, the crowned head,
the wanderer, man and his horse and his dog, satisfied.

Moksha is the horse, Sati is the dog, I am the saddle *****.

Hand to hand hand grenades,
order out of chaos, leaves a dent, in tented tavernacle choir

concertina wire, I am on the outside of,
how does this happen, I might ask, but as you may have learned

this is a trope in a neverending story told to myself in solitaire.

And now, I spend my time thinking through it,
as it happens, using tech that is as magic now as ever was,

but part of me paid attention, in crypto-school,
part of me did endure the mandatory drill morse code
five letter pattern, random faction find FTA reoccuring,

the signal is hope, yes, hope we find the answer,
yessir, I put that on my helmet to say what we all say,
with these plastic forks with one prong, onward finger,
remember the answer was once known, we must tell the world.

That is why I fight, sir, yessir, very good, thank you,
three day pass bull shat, in front of god and eve'body,
just
but for foolish jesting, ha
like god don't make jokes, you ever seen a golden Hemoroid?
Jonathan Moya Jul 2020
Her name you may
or may not recall.
It was Chrissie,
the body in the sand dune.

You do remember the shark,
the blood on the water,
death spreading like
a virus in the town of Amity.

You do remember that
the beaches should have been closed
but Amity was a summer town
that lived on summer dollars.

You do remember the shark
doing what it was built to do—
killing Mrs. Kintner’s little boy
on that beautiful July 4th day.

You do remember Mrs. Kintner’s
cold blooded slap
on police chief Brody’s
warm blooded face.

“You knew there was a shark out there.
You knew it was dangerous
but you let people go swimming anyway.
You knew all those things

-BUT STILL MY BOY IS DEAD NOW!”

“She’s wrong,”
the mayor says.
“No, she’s not,”
Chief Brody acknowledges.

Suddenly you remember
reading a news piece
that Mrs. Kintner (Lee Fiero)
was a victim of the pandemic.

You realize there is no
police chief, scientist, grizzled old salt
banding together to do the right thing,
uniting to triumph over disease, death,

Only the orange hair President
standing deep in the drowning tide
smiling and waving and
telling everyone the water is fine.

“We are all Mrs. Kintner  now.”


Note:

The final line is a quote by Mary McNamara,
the obituary writer for the Los Angeles Times.
"To achieve World government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism, and religious dogmas."
-- Brock Adams, Director U.N. Health Organization

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, it was planned that way." -- Teddy Roosevelt

"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within." -- Joseph Stalin,  dictator of the Soviet Union

"The commitment of government to deal with the population issue is of course essential...There are many ways to make the death rate increase." -- Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, "New Solidarity," March 30, 1981
Robin McNamara Sep 2020
Slithery, slimy snakes and snails,
Wriggling, crawling, sliming across
The forest floor in the undergrowth.

Nibbling magic mushrooms, giggling like
Alice in Wonderland.

Buttercups, teacups, all here in the undergrowth, the poet’s imagination.

Robert Frost, lost in woods by a road in the undergrowth.
(Seriously!)

No time to waste, run rabbit run. How the lichen and moss grows so slow and so old.

Robin McNamara

— The End —