Boa's Ark - Part 1

1. MORNING HAS BROKEN The men, in lines, tramp two by two, forgetting all the women who indulged them through a night of tricks (their lips designed with crimson sticks, their eyes a wild mascara mix) and think instead on times ahead when they’ll be gone, their bodies dead (some rotting slow’, some mummified) though once they were their mummy’s pride. Attired bright in uniforms, they strew their bombs in desert storms - like melting sands, the sky deforms with darkness, death - and doomsday swarms through ravished lands where fires warm the corpses, cold and puriform. Their eyes flash forward towards the backs of lucky ones who have the knack of never being in the way of bursts of bullets as they stray (effacing phantoms faraway) and dodging doom’s Redemption Day. They’re wishing for a foggy morn or best of all to be unborn, and peering down to mark the sway of wings in webs while spiders prey, they wonder when their time will come and they can cease their fleeing from the sights they’ve seen, the deeds they’ve done, the life they’ve lost, the death they’ve won, then muse a while upon the child they killed today when they went wild, and when they’re finally reconciled with broken bodies stacked and piled, they ponder, does she have a kin to curse them for their burning sin? And if she does, will god reply with tooth for tooth and eye for eye? Or will her clan be mild and meek and simply turn the other cheek? 2. MIDDAY MUSINGS They’re counting steps to pass the time and puzzle if they’ll reach their prime or if instead they’ll serve the worm their carnal flesh and aching sperm when soon, perhaps, they sleep in berth provided by the chilling earth, and fret about the fate they’ll find below the stones that slowly grind. And once or twice will come to mind a sultry smile they left behind (the distant past - a tepid trace – another time, another place), reflected in the gray grimace that paints a frightened fading face. And on they trek through guilt and gloom to track their own and others' doom and soon they’ll grace another pool with blood of other beings who’ll inhale no more the evening airs, unlike the wily Functionaires who brutalize the fighting men and send them far away and then (relaxed, unwound, with victories made) confer with sword an accolade on those who’ve lopped bowed heads, with blade, so someone bent must turn a spade to hack a hole which then is filled with all the cloven bodies killed then cloaked with clay or loamy dirt, as if to hide the pain and hurt. Continued in Part 2