Every war, in short, is just a cliche,
From ranting bombast through to pity's tears,
With dumbness, murder, lies & black denials,
Plus mayhem, waste, futility and jeers,
Blood pulsing through your temples, drained through fields,
The thrill, the fear, the hate, the love, the laughs,
The mawkishness which cuts each way you look,
Monotonous statistics, bashful graphs.
Each war, to put it bluntly, is a cliche.
Always will be; always has been too;
Their tropes merely performative show business:
Her child's leg pulped; a medal pinned on you;
A speech to stir defiance or fresh vengeance;
Injustices so ancient we've lost count;
The stark biology of massive trauma;
The way that pus clots in such prinked amounts.
All wars, to ram the point home, must be cliches:
That's the way we know how they'll be waged.
You stretch your purity until the tension
Requires fresh pogroms of the unengaged;
The sublimation of all random people
To hazy myths from whence we might have sprung,
That aging cranks in bunkers can perfect how
The old can wreak revenge upon the young.
This war, in other words, remains a cliche.
If it was me there now I'd howl for blood
At that pathetic cheap hood's crass neuroses,
And how they'd churned my friends into the mud.
I'd want to loose the darkness we all harbour
To fight a darkness of far darker hues.
Freedom, too, is just a cliche. And yet
Cliches are cliches because, well, they're true.