A Declaration of Truth

 

I don’t know,

     I just don’t know the full experience,

If someone had told me it was theirs,

I wouldn’t have believed,

Wouldn’t have understood

Wouldn’t have wanted to understand!

 

Seven years at war,

     Central America,

Africa – Middle East and Balkan

     Still,

I would only return for her

Only keep my passion held tightly

In a northern town far from

Duty.

 

Seven years getting steadily worse

Not one wanted to savour –

But chide away

Choosing instead the immersion

Of pain in Spirits and ale.

 

     She took,

All she could,

Couldn’t take anymore

The violence of sanity prospecting a fall

Resigning instead to cast me away,

And forgotten a hero,

I couldn’t blame her at all,

For I in turn had forsaken my heart

And drifting, we parted like

The crack of a stubborn tree,

(splintered and hurt), and only then,

I remembered the human inside.

 

Crackle and hiss

My tears would not stop

And as the months passed

The pain remained and,

Every day, every night

Tears gained in strength

Like an idol brook to violent a river,

My face screwed belonging

Only to a mirror of hate.

 

     Fire!

Burn my beating heart,

Burn in flame all salt from these waters

That can never be quiet,

Burn till my innards have gone

Sterilize and cauterize and dramatize

Till nothing.

 

Empty of all I had give

I prayed in earnest she only forgives,

For no more in a uniform the suffering fool

No more a new memory of sweetest the smile,

That memory of love

Now returns only a silence

As my tears through flame

Were at once extinguished,

And I still pray she forgives

As solemn in sorrow I’m with regrets,

     Year after year

Succumbing to free-fall

Of no future, I remained

Dry of the wealth that I had,

 

     But here I am,

No more weighted a weapon,

No more a witness to bomb-blasts,

No more the memories of starved refugees

No more the crying Iraqi,

No more homeless the African,

No more the Croat whose family are dead,

No need the love keeping me sane through the madness,

No more the want to extinguish a love

Through hell and damnation.

 

     Here writes fallen a man

Still picking through the rubble

To put back his heart,

I grieve in quantities for all

That I’ve seen,

But quiet in sadness for love

Taken in youth,

And it’s sorrow I’m with

While she tends to my qualms,

And I’m not of harm,

I’m not the one

Who pulled the first trigger,

And I’m still begging forgiveness

For bruising a Dame as lame,

I’m tarnished from

A World still brokering War.   

 

Michael J Waite. 18^th May 2012.