Shell Shock and Righteousness

I WRITE TO give word the war is over;
SO says miss Vincent, so say we all: and in the wreck of Europe, a whore lies
wracked down, racked up, along the white lines of chemical
that blistered so many in the final hours. Smouldering land is bubbled and black
in great swathes of blunder. Chemical snow, chemical rain,
and chemical thunder, over, the land is poison. The corpses of cities are hung out beyond the abyss, people fall from their bodies
like fleas; where is the soul?
the world is melted, Europa melted, grey slag all devoted and broiled, roll
in boiling waves of toxic shame, all spoiled and curdled,
fields and pastures made rot and ruin. Friendly soot –
once the blood of chimneys only  - now pumps and chokes roots and branches, family trees, like post-traumatic smoke disorder, it tries to blanket over burnout husks
in efforts to protect them, vain and late – unhappily it aids the murder as they
slowly suffocate. Churches suffer shattered windows and butchers find their
trade is commonplace, trains forget railings and dance along the bulging tarmac
make figure-skating axels and curve half-moon gorges out of cul-du-sacs and factories

my god

in the sky the fungal bloom, world spit and split, gush wounded atoms in lethal frenzies round and round and bright and bright – make a blur of day and night – melt men into women into soil and paper, leave shadows on walls and skin on horror, and
blossom, hush, 
the mushroom cloud grows out and up
a pillowing erection.

I, cowled and crowded with red leather, stand atop a building and watch winds, streaked through with rust and wrath, blister across my ruined Europe, oh Europa.
my red hair, once billow free and curling, is short and cropped - a military crew – and underneath my cloak lies fatigues of fabric, a bitter armour for the bruising clouds of lilac blue.
And in my head someone kindly takes a stylus of a polished gramophone and scratchily, mnemonically, puts on the Doors and
sings ‘this is the end’. I close my eyes and think of napalm and that this is worse than napalm, and this, oh, Europa, is worse than napalm.
I stare at
long, dreary routes of burnt paris and warehouse raves, all churning, slushing, ashing.
the queerest thing hungover, my god, and all Europa burned, my god
all along the watchtower I’m strung like heads of enemies defeated


lips, pursed, like a pair of fresh blackberries part close to my ear and blame me,
but I am only half a man now, and even then I was only half-aware, half-in-the-world and half-out-of-it.
I am not at fault.

Lightning crackles in waspy arcs across the vaults and deep amongst the ruins of the world snake-haired furies hunt an auburn saint. As thunder comes,
with whips of scorpions and fists of bronze, they hunt an auburn saint
in the name of resolution
they hunt an auburn saint
who runs









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