FIRST WORLD WAR POEM

FIRST WORLD WAR POEM

In my dreams,
I am unable to recover Flanders.
My white-bread soul
Has no authentic equivalent
For gangrene.
Happily asleep,
My three-year-old daughter says
(Speaking, it seems, in Japanese)
"Corny come too!"
In her dreams also,
It seems,
The black cows of tank attacks and mustard gas
Are missing.
My dreams move on,
Chaotically.
From the shattered plaster-of-paris replica
Of my mother's soul,
I cannot recover
My younger brother's identity.
An attempt to salvage it in mp3
Is thwarted by a bureaucratic popup
Demanding his surcease number.
Which I do not have.

Lacking authentic cataclysm,
I will content myself with the Grand Armada,
And our last-ditch assault on Pivot.
Our wraith ships spewn across transcosmic battlefields,
Falling and failing,
The last barrage of our suicide ships
Death-dwindling in a firefly kamikaze.
My father's father fought at Somme
And lived.
The missing Wraith Ships
Are no more recoverable than he is.
On a planet of buried battlefields I attempt
To dream to the black cow stratum,
To dream down,
Descending,
Falling
Past Madonna's contract,
Paris Hilton's fragrance,
Marcel's mime
To a death mask which will answer to my name.

Beyond Freudian psychology,
Beyond the realms of the ego and the id,
There lies the truest self,
The self called marzipan,
The reveler who enjoys
Bouncing in the mind's bright plastic play pen
On bean bags stuffed with empty eyes and surcease numbers.
Reclining on the bags, I fall to sleep,
And night, at last,
The true and real black cow night,
Descends,
With its buckets of faceless faces,
Settles upon my face ...
To shroud them.