V Less E Plus F

It’s hard not to wish
To read what is wise.

Smart folks want the wise.
Dumb folks want the wise.

Some of the worst fools,
Like us, want the wise.

Scan the shelves. No. No.
Not much there is wise.

The whole store of wise,
All the books and texts,

All the shelves and art,
Or the whole mess packed

In one and null strings—
Count each edge, each face,

Each point of a turn,
And then take the first

From the last and add
The face count—how much

Is wise, all in all?
What’s the shape of wise?

Two? One? None? Not much
More or less than that

Is wise. It would soothe
Us to know the right

Signs to make us wise.

Play Up! Play Up! And Play the Game!

These are the words that year by year

Have morphed and warped the minds of boys,

Have morphed to slip back in fresh brains

In forms that seem like brand new words

But aren’t—are tweaked but much the same.

The thought is that you should be brave,

You should give your all for your team,

If that means blood, if that means death.

It shifts in shape, a ghoul like that,

But it comes down to, Give your life,

And take the lives we tell you to,

And it’s true that there’s a straight line

From fields of play to fields of death,

But you might take note this charge works

As well for one group as the next.

When will it end? Don’t waste your breath.

No One Then Dreamed of Four Years’ War

The past in the head
Is lens in a lens—
This nook of the dark
Spooks us seen from that
Thought that we just had.

We don’t look back from now
But from near to far,
Far then back to near,
And we squint mind’s eye.
This then, oh, that then,

If that then back then
Had known the next then
We now know! The war,
The drought years to come
Since the floods, the loss

Of the world we knew,
All this that we know,
The chess set that we move
In our cramped skulls, look
At the depth, the lens

In the lens in lens,
The past that sees the past
And thinks, how could we
Not have known how much
We could not have known?