Encore

Let’s leave the city
Leave it wanting more
An ovation innovation
For once not honouring the encore
Run flat out on our flat feet
To a place where we can find
Some semblance of self

Sit beneath the trees in the old orchard
And who cares if they’re rotten
Or if this dry grass is long dead
Wiry, dried out and gone
We can still breathe the air
Where we had fewer cares
And brighter skies
Those stars flickered through
With no smog to obscure

To hold back a heartbeat
Or a celestial body
To grasp either in one’s
Hand is not for the likes of us
So live and let live
To die another day
A long time from now
As we stroke our fingers through the dew
And the dirt

We’ll be glad we never outstayed our
Welcome and a welcome home
When we reach that front door
Would always wait for us
When we returned from
The bright lights and tight streets

Charging breakneck through fields
With a sense of finality and urgency
We urge ourselves on
Toward the tower, sat alone
On a hill as it always had
Since long before we burst forth
And will be long after we’re gone
All of us

Let’s leave the leaves
The grass, the skies
Leave the country wanting more

Conflagration

Fill the grenade with grenadine
We’ll reutilise the war effort
Repair, recycle and reuse
In such imaginative ways
Yet if all our swords are ploughshares
And all our bullets turned to bracelets
We’ll only beat each other
To death with farm machinery

I’m all for hugging trees
Yet sometimes you need to carve out a
Spear handle and use the light from
That spare candle to whittle out a
Sharp point to penetrate and pierce

We won’t be here much longer
The way we carry on
Carrying out covert ops
Covering the tops of our
Hidey holes with thick foliage
Thin branches delicately draped
Across the entrance

And yet these new school
Retro, remade, post modern
Contraptions keep on turning
Ammunition into pencil sharpeners
And gasmasks into fishbowls
We can deny it all we want
But we all know we’ll need it again
Soon, wipe down the respirator and
Chamber the parer

Bear down on them with teeth bared
And our right to arms a necessity
When it’s been ingrained for so long
A culture built on blood
Soft, slippery surface to lay foundations
Upon
They did it anyway

Fine days and dark nights
Fly by without much more than a whisper
Flickering and flitting through
As we cling on to what we hold dear
Drag it deep down to comfort us
We’ll sit here watching the world burn
And brush dry tinder toward

A forest fire
Breathing in the pine
As it crackles and chokes
Into life
A conflagration for the flagburners
And the deathbringers
The wild, the hungry, desperate and dreary
No survivors set the world afire
And none of us ever expected to make it out alive