I won’t say I’m an artist.
Twenty years since I left the army,
and I’m still a brute.
A quiet, trilingual, slippery brute
nondescript in faded gray.
Don’t believe this tripe
about butchers’ hands and
poets’ souls;
those epics sung, of gents with guns
in leather shoes and silken suits—
chess games played under Tuscan suns—
or these doe-eyed myths of humane regret.
Blood and ashes are never cleansed with tears
(but bribery does the trick—
or else, ammonia, in a pinch.)
I’ve trodden Russians underfoot,
buried them in congealing snow
—never looked back.
It’s just a job by numbers, and I’m a clown,
with a name of numbers,
juggling with pulse and breath. |
Submission Name: Spygames
