Class Of 1940

Running in grace along the parapets, the city walls, picked clean by the wind from off the desert go the figures in my idea of what happened to everyone I ever knew. The sun is low and the air is cold, threatening a frost tonight, white water on every cold surface. We will be indoors, up against the fire with drink and meat and song. Our conversation will interrupt the games we play tonight like the diversions before a long-anticipated battle and we will get drunk, roaring and slapping backs with gusto. I see the light from the fire, flickering against the walls, making shadows of the honey tangle, the mess of joy and hope that means that this war is ended.

In the halls and glass rooms, our generals negotiate the humiliation and crushing of a whole people. Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping” The tiger growls and chews his cigar. Curious! I see the white clouds, the smoke that burns. We made peace for these people and they crush us back. How sad that we go to find the deadliest things we can think of in position of this sad man and when we find nothing, we send these things ourselves. Oh Phosphorous is a grey area in the white smoke, a diversion, fully legal under any convention we have signed. I cannot sleep my love. I won’t tell anyone else but you but maybe I made a mistake. I have killed people and now they want to kill me. I say march them all out into the middle of the parade ground and let them kill each other; leave us to get on with our own lives. Nothing is in my name, the libertarian sighs and rolls over, dreaming of his first million, his first mandolin repeating down through history. No statesmen ever lived for you have to be dead to be one.

I take philosophy and all its complications and diversions, wrap it up with grace and reverence and send it back to explain my actions. The trouble is that no one else can understand it. Maybe the emperor gets it, but sometimes even I don’t so what hope is there for those that consume the output of the novel-writing machines, those that chant the acid and hate for things they cannot understand. There are proto-imperialists in every school, taking money from the gentle children, turning into the businessmen and thugs that tell us what we should read and watch and eat and learn and how we should live and die. They won’t die alone and uncared for; the warders might shed a tear for the passing of their perks and tips for soft things to make the hard cell slightly brighter. One down today, when they catch him, the decent man who tells us how to think. I hear that old harmonica on the step, a summer evening ending with a doughboy back from his only war, wishing for the shock to end and all those dreams of shells and mud to go away. And it was right to end it like he did, stepping from the window, ending on the railings, guttering and foaming as the light fades and the black of dispersing atoms coming on him.
I will never know that shock, that crump and ping of metal projected to kill me.