Madness To The Method

They dressed me in dust and called it a uniform, Handed me thunder stitched in steel, Told me the sky breaks different When you pull the trigger. I was nineteen, Still dreaming in my mother’s accent, Still soft in the places They'd soon carve into callous. War, they said, was order— A hymn of strategy and sweat, A chessboard with bones for bishops And pawns that bleed. But I watched boys burst like overripe fruit, Watched a man try to pack his insides back in, Fingers fumbling like he’d dropped his keys, The lock already gone. We marched through villages That smelled of burnt hair and children's toys, And I learnt that silence Has many screams beneath it. There is no glory in a crater. No justice in a bootprint. Just the cold arithmetic of survival: You breathe, or you don’t. They taught us to paint targets On anything that moved wrong, Like humanity was a colouring book And we’d run out of gray. I shot a man once. He looked surprised. Like he had just remembered something— His daughter's name, The soup cooling on the stove. And the method? It was madness polished to procedure. A doctrine etched in blood And laminated in lies. Now, at night, I still hear the cadence of gunfire, A lullaby in Morse code. Sometimes I hum along. Because there’s a rhythm to ruin, A beat to the breaking. And once you’ve danced in that tempo— God help you— You never stop hearing the song.