Cognitive Dissonance in Blue and Grey

You’re always going to hate me,
It’s in your nature,
Colouring me in montone,

Pushing down the whole world,
Under one blue ocean,
Squeezing it to fit your single mind.

You were a towering non-believer,
Immune to the false hypnosis,
Armed with the real,

The sparking arc of ignorance,
Enlightened by knowing,
What you didn’t know,

Weaponised out of existence,
Until you were some shadow,
Talked of in low voices,

Marked for death and resurrection,
A figurehead of evolution,
Absorbing vitriol like a sunset.

But some bullet got you later,
A venom-polluted shell,
Painted delicately in tribal colours,

Which diffused like river dyes,
Released to trace the hidden track,
Of unknown tributaries,

Through your blood and brain,
Like the mad dilution you still deny,
(It pains me to agree).

And you hate and package,
Whole peoples as of one mind,
To kill all those that oppose,

Or end them, badging them as void,
Imagining yourself as target,
Their shining path objective.

There’s a military camp reflected,
In your censure,
Gold braided generals in the films,

You run unhindered when alone,
Stamping, escalating columns,
Irreligious armies mobilised.

What peace is this that comes with boots,
With tracks and guttering exhausts,
To tear up the land with cavalry?

What truce and truth from afterburners,
Prises answers from the poverty,
The dust and refugee,

Already sensitive and sinister,
Suspicious of the aid from troops,
And you in their face?

I’m sensitive and wrong,
The face of a new European poet,
Delighting in my lack of fight.

You’re tough and pulsing,
Threatening to burst your vessel,
A blood-spitting snake,

Coughing up the black smoke,
Of generations,
Breathing in sick history,

To report your fears of invasion,
Of demographic infiltration,
Of a nation sleep walking,

Out of your English bed and bedrock,
Over the hills of Jerusalem,
And into the distant grey.