Under My Sofa

After

My mama once told me when all's said and done
When the fighting is over and the war is won
She said that's the time when its best to run
She said plaster your back against the sun
And run and run until your legs feel like lead
Until you can look in the mirror after what you said
The hopes and dreams that shatter, dead
Until can you face the battlefield inside of your head
The scavengers pecking at milky eyes
The dead are lying thanks to the living's lies
Ringing silence replaces battlecries
Until the feuding starts between the allies
Severing the once necessary ties
That were simply a means to an end
But is it the end? Still so much to break before we can mend
Fill brains with tales of serve and defend
Then watch them splatter into the dirt
Did it hurt?
Are we as lifeless as the dead, or just inert?
The tattered fabric once held up with pride
The wind ripples along its muddied side
And that's the only movement among those who are dead inside
I fool myself into believing it cried
As the breeze animates the tattered rips
It never lived, never died, but it slips
From the hand of a solider, words forming on lips
That person did both, but the scale tips
He was walking the line between dead and alive
But he fell off the knife's edge on the wrong side
As we barely tipped into the place we survive
And wonder which one of us really had it better
Skeletons dance, but corpses lay still
Blankly watching where their guts spill
Drying out in a place where you be killed or kill
A place where the living are stiller still
They rest, we freeze
I take my mama's advice and flee with the breeze
Wishing that I held the keys
Not to unlock but shut away
The thoughts that plague us every day
To shackle deep inside my brain
To hide them there and run away
To sheath forever the banners that sway
But I don't have that key, so I have to pay
The silence forces knives down my throat
Invalidates every word I wrote
I'm as dependant as a boat
Bobbing on seas that could turn in the end
Some last words of wisdom did my mama lend

When the war is over you can try your best to mend
But don't take an enemy as a friend

***

I have family in the army -- a cousin in the SAS and the like, though I'm not allowed to go into it -- and it's always after they come back home that they struggle. Call it PTSD, call it survivors' guilt, whatever. They have a hard time coming to terms with their actions.

To a lesser extent, but in a similar way, I never feel like I've won a fight -- physical or verbal -- if I don't think I've held up to my moral code during the conflict. I won't deny to be quite a hotheaded person, and sometimes it leaves me regretting my actions afterwards.

True to the poem, my mother always used to tell me when we fought that I shouldn't be able to look in the mirror after saying bad things to her, because part of me was her and I was insulting myself. I disagree, but the sentiment remains.

Alex xxx