All War Poets Now

We are all war poets now.

Screens where the fires are burning
Leak black smoke into rooms,
Curdling like smog around the heart.

A stench of revenge falls
Like ashes from the clouds of it.

We are all war poets now.
Innocence died long ago
In the landscape of wires.

Warring factions slug it out;
Pixels flicker and blur
In solid-state acceptance
Of the interminable.

We are war poets…
Because we are witnesses…

…to death rendered second hand,
Well-thumbed before we see it,
Summarised and clichéd,
Humanity edited out.

We are the ones
Who dare not look away…

…cowering on a battlefield of pictures;
Never in the line of fire
Except for reprisal
When the spill of wars
Lays consequence at our feet,
Blows ill wind through our doors.

Then we begin to shiver
With the Devil’s hot breath
Moist upon our craning necks.

We are all war poets
Now there is more than enough
Of war.

© BH 2015

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Our vicarious world. We have names for our idleness: innocent bystander, couch potato, dilettante, armchair general. It suits the power elite that we digest our bread well while the circuses perform. Cynical, though, is the way we're mesmerised by real events remodelled to push the required buttons.

We all have opinions, observations. We're all commentators, poets of a kind. We're led to think that, while war piles up bodies, it's truly a battle of hearts and minds. What they don't explain is the hearts and minds that really matter are our own.

More than enough of war...

NB Bit of a bonus, being #53 for the year. And I couldn't resist Robert Wyatt (the younger) as the mugshot!