1 Above deck, ice-scarred, off to Albion. ___ Let it be named so, for the dynastic furies combed into heads, pressed into lines of boys shouting ‘here, sir,’ and ‘not here, sir’ at devotion or on the parade ground, leaping over shadows as the sea broke with their names interred in the same roster, fidgeting with oceanic sorrow. Happy Grove. They climbed the sea-charged cannons. They looked up the school’s purple and gray walls. They chattered like parakeets in the breeze. Then their scurrilous voices crossed strict waves, bound by an ardor to move while standing hidden in the open, an infantry stalled in the holy metal of the sun. Flecked dust and heat. Melting vellum. Lament. ___ A boy struggled with the flag, crack-lashing from his hands like a fer-de-lance. Scorched, turned and watched charcoal burners; shipwrights; tailors; clerks; fishermen; motor engineers; blacksmiths; cooks; mechanics as it whisked away in the grass. Laughter broke across ranks. The chased earned him his name: Godspeed. Godspeed! A khaki blitz chorused their mute, fettered pain, the future’s fata morgana raging sargasso eyes bulge as if a mirror lapses time: Jesus of Lübeck? Braunfisch? No: iron twins Karlsruhe and Dresden, incandescent drift amid reefs at sunset rumoured to be wedding-torches to puncture these poppies blackened with the unknown names stung to their chests each morning like courtiers of empire, primed to rake the play field small wars erupted noon: “A Ras! a Ras!” aimed at the Zion-haired boy, who mirrored the sound, that broken water place gurgled from poppies: the dread Arras. Through bells he heard this, mouths gashed with ringing, fell in ordered rows, tilted like ships in the glare. So many, sugar; rum; cocoa; coffee; rice; logwood; bauxite; oranges, lime juice (for prevention of scurvy); mahogany propellers and 9 aeroplanes; 11 ambulances; cotton (for balloons) 15,600 drawn into the affray cousins make, mortared to haul martyrs from mud trenches, then the sand trenches, where the anonymous sprung up a permanent humility. Recover, ice-scarred, above deck, back to Old Britain. 2 No. 46 Sgt. A.V. Chan “A” boy killed in action on the ROMAN ROAD between GRANT RIDGE and BAGHALLAT. He was buried at the foot of MUSSELABEH. Veni redemptory gentium sang the celestial voice men of SAINT VINCENT. Yes come gently. Gently like the small rain 0f rosewater murmuring from a black hand. It was around this time the principal cutoff Godspeed’s dreadlocks. His mother slapped the daylights out of the principal and was thrown into the jail at GOLDEN GROVE. Godspeed wept in his khaki as by GAZA when Samson felt the pillars breathed in his palms. He lit tails of foxes mongooses cats snakes and cousins with lightnings. He poured rubbing alcohol in his jam jar of fireflies and set it ablaze. He was knife scissors razors with a sharp ringing in his ears and bald head and he hid in the bosom of stars bald and chalked a circle of misery bald to place every principal in and then buried the sheaves of his head bald and with a jackass jawbone he stormed the jail and fed his mother roasted corn thundering “It is easy to remember and hard to forget I Bop I own the trumpet I am the Gorgon.” To fierce Kumina drumming and rum at midnight No.46 Sgt. A.V. Chan soul flew to MIDIAN accordingly. After Godspeed lost the precept of his head he lost his mind and found it in the larvae of bees outside EIN GEDI where he exalted himself like a young palm tree. The following other ranks boarded at “M” Special Hospital at ABBASSIA awaiting passage to the WEST INDIES. Dark matters in the sun they resembled prehistoric hills of charcoal soaked by rain mouthing bits of the Sixth Book of Maccabees. In KANTARA one
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