INTRODUCTION

We are now on Day #7 of this 7-day series of war poems which will culminate on November 11th. On Day #1, I already gave a pithy intro to the series. You can still consult that intro if you would like to understand more about it. I also presented a double-sonnet entitled “Another Side of War” which examined the bellicose nature of the belligerent, divisive Left-Right paradigm in politics. On Day #2, I presented another double-sonnet, entitled “Make Yourself a No-One”. It opened up how to respond when your government wages war against its own population by introducing a digital “Bitte Ihre Unterlagen!” (“Papers, please!”) society. On Day #3, I presented a poem entitled “When Wars Become a Warcrime”, which deals with the terrible toll that warring takes on its combatants who so easily become dehumanized merely by being in a “theatre” in which anything goes, regardless of any conventions. On Day #4, I presented a poem entitled “The Cosmic Struggle”, which took Matthew 24:6 as its starting point to show the place of war in the cosmos and the struggle which underlies it . Yesterday, on Day #5, I presented a sonnet entitled “Another Way of Killing”, which explored how waging war goes much further than merely fighting on a battlefield with physical weapons. Yesterday, on Day #6, I presented a sonnet which was inspired by the US government changing the name of a department from being “of Defense” to “of War”, which seems to be rather portentous and menacing. Today, on Day #7, I present a substantial poem entitled “War is Who we Are!” (written in 2015, now updated) showing how all so-called war is merely an extreme external manifestation of the conflictual elements which lie within the depraved human heart of unregenerate mankind. Here is the poem:

War, the wanton mascot of a catastrophic aeon;
disfigured, numb, decaying, steeped in slime.
Barely having climbed out from the swamp
(as evolutionary fantasists would gobly say)
we dumbly think that if we don a suit and tie
we earn the right to peer down our noses at the
cockroaches and flies we claim in all our ersatz glory
to have overtaken long ago and left behind.
But we are worse by far than they will ever be,
masquerading as the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree —
proof our fallen-fractured consciousness disjoints
the human heart and mind and issues in hostility.

The oddest thing of all to me is that there’s not one
person in this world who claims that war is good;
but yet, being cowed, we allow ourselves like fodder
for the cattle (though those cattle types are us)
to be thrown into the abattoir and herded roughly
to some frontline farce where then we die to satisfy
the twisted lust and dysenteried minds of dark unmen
who drank a toast to victory upon gardens green,
sipping sherry on the lawn and eating caviar,
while lads (and even lasses now I’mlostforwords) were
spattered round the theatre walls. I’ve seen it all. Again.

Though one may scoff with venomous disdain at all
these words of mine and vigorously claim they only
represent a narrow-minded trigger-happy nasty few,
that’s where we go awry, exposing crassly how we
cultivate deliberately a skewed contorted point of view.
For every single one without exception on this sphere
has disengaged our consciousness and cells
each time we thrust our crude disjointed selves
in self-assertive mode, to carve out for those “selves”
a baser, third-dimension, fleshly ego-centred road.

Everything you love is run along the lines of war,
where battle’s done as if to prove that one is better
than by far another — though, in truth, he is your
brother or your sister, husband, friend or just some
other dude with whom there’s never need for pointless
competition, contest, bout or other opposition.
Olympic So-Called Games, your sport and football teams,
promote a conflict-ridden world to me (that’s how it seems).
“City Thrashes Reds!” the headline in your rag proclaims
with chauvinistic gusto and some irony and hype.
Maybe you are not the sporting type; but vote instead
for parties drawn up for a vicious and protracted fight.
It really doesn’t matter if you’re ‘left’ or ‘right’ —
it’s all the same; blue or red, you’re just two sides of one
dirt coin rolling down a dark and twisted lane where
nothing changes but the faces and the clinging stink
of mould; and when your own has won the race you drink
then jeer the loser for some light & sporting fun. How bold!

In Boy’s Own comic books the blasted bowels
are airbrushed from the page. A soldier’s rage
at what he’s seen and friends he’s lost at such
a jingoistic cost are veiled by all the glorytalk & tales
of how the enemy was routed and destroyed.
Alliances are formed, deployed. They come and go
& all I see is one vast endless needless flow of blood
(while countless faces lie face-down in filthy mud)
of those allegedly who “gave their lives for freedom”
so that you and I are free to vote for murderers
to take their place and coldly plan another war
for all the hearts of evil in this world to ask for more.

There is no freedom; neither has there ever been.
Democracy is engineered consent by powermen
and women too (who campaigned for “equality”
to kill and vie in corporate wars and shun the doors
I open for them out of kindness and to show that
I revere their wombs but all they want is freedom
to participate in sending young lads to their doom).
There’ll never be equality for equal’s not the prize
we’re meant to seek. I’ll never match the talent
of a painter; but I will rejoice to see her work excel.
If everyone was made a millionaire, within no time
at all, because there will be those who share and
those who keep it for themselves, no more will they
be equal in the means they have to buy and sell.

“It’s natural!” you cry. “It’s just survival of the fittest!”
Yes, within the baser terms of older aeon’s scheme
that scrambledom to beat the other down has
been the central and predominating theme.
“Dog eat dog!”, you say. “Nature red in tooth & claw!”
The time will come (and not so very long, I hope)
when these will be our careless epigrams no more.
For everything on earth’s about to change
and how I long to see the tides of evil wane
and stars fall from the heavens on a fallen world
which had its chance but chose a broken path, insane.

Peace is just the briefsome space between two wars.
And war is seen as glorious — a theatreplace
where man can show his worth and even women
now partake in ersatz glory fights as if to prove
equality, whether or not the war they make is right.
There is no real glory in a war, no matter how much
we romanticize its gore. As Wilfred Owen rightly said:
“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
to children ardent for some desperate glory,
the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”.
“To die for one’s country is honorable and sweet”.
A lie as old as the hills which run with blood
and in which the flesh and bones of billions
have made the milk of cows which fed upon the cud.

How twisted we have all become; a nightmare
to ourselves when all the trash is said and done.
I won’t cry out for truth today, for who will care?
I shan’t cry out for peace, for who would hear?
Who will see that conflict starts within ourselves,
not in a politician’s office or a house upon a hill?
(Although it’s true they rubber-stamp the war).
For every time, if we’ve not cleansed our souls,
we think or act or speak unconsciously, we kill.

We play our little games of life, imagining that we,
in all our trite supposed superiority, are liberal
in thought and deed. We quaff our wines, commit
our bourgeois crimes (such as hypocrisy and
reverse snobbery), and all the while our minds
are merely improvised through imitating what
we think is cool and trendy (intellectually we are
little more than frankensteins) who claim to be
opposed to war, to which we say from out of one
side of our mouths “No more!”, yet from the
other side we nasty whisper all our gossiping and
character assassinations and sell pretended love
in bottles by the score (yet never noticing that
conflicts from within eventually project themselves
across the globe in war), refusing to release ourselves
from victimhood (as those who have professed to
be opposed to warring rightly should) we then
recite our writtenforus parts and poems as if our
virtue-signalling means even more than truth itself,
then vote for parliaments to fight our proxy wars &
keep our false concerns as ornaments upon the shelf.

Deep disheartened by this miasmatic human abattoir,
I vomit hard… for truly WAR is WHO we ARE.
So I console myself with filigreesome thoughts
that we must look within and see things as we ought.
This world is just a fancy hologram made up of energy
and light played on a cosmic canvas for our waking dreams.
It’s Mighty Maker has created it to be some kind of liturgy
behind which truth impales itself on suffering, or so it seems.
Yet, if we peel away that grief and find what’s true,
that all this world is really but a stage on which to find
out who we serve instead of all the silly roles we play,
we’ll see that life without that Maker leaves us misaligned.
When bound to Him, instead of to our warring little selves,
we’ll find this way of death will have become a blur;
and then, at last, we’ll say that WAR is WHO we WERE!

.

[This poem became a 130-page eBook in 2022, which can be freely downloaded here: https://diakrisis-project.com/2022/11/10/new-book-war-is-who-we-are/ ].

.

.

.

© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2025
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]

.