For ChrisH
Usefully I'd legislate myself away he says,
Borne on the red wind to my oblivion,
But he is a deep sea fish, all teeth and rot,
A compound fury concealed in doggerel,
Barely holding back the spit and fleck,
Of rage and half-concealed despair,
We fail him with our lack of intellect,
One word in three or two above us,
And he berates obscenely, all our errors,
How we fail to understand the world,
Our place in it to serve just ourselves,
And now we are in the next war,
Unarmed with wit and cool obscurity,
One side victorious in Martin’s war,
The other trained in ill-formed invective,
Built on the containment of emotion,
And here I walk the narrow line myself,
Versed in biofeedback slowing hearts,
To limit tremors in the bolts I loose,
Secretly aching for that killer blow,
The froth-corrupted injury of silence,
That staggers; that shuts him up for good,
A word or two as a billion hollow points,
Launched late in this oh-so civil war,
At seven tonight we win, we break the news,
Of victory, the climb to sunlit uplands,
We can predict it perfectly, to a moment,
The fall of the last soldiers, posed on hills,
And left and right stand hand-in-hand,
Awaiting approbation that must surely come,
Citations, mentions in despatches, medals,
Glinting in the bloody light of evening,
But there are dead fonts now, empty op-eds,
The raw, unfollowed critic’s training course,
Swinging in the winds of change and spite,
It’s all one-sided now and in the name of balance,