Sunday, August 23, 2009

506. CRUSADER

CRUSADER
We manned the barricades with fortunate guile,
having spent four months at least in preparing
the grounds for this stupid defense. Everyone
was already in pain : an old, grueling pain
of the sort that stops all other action.
The crippled monk, with his withered
leg, came around with the parchment
he’d scrawled for our oaths.
We had – yet again – to swear
allegiance to some crazed Man-God,
somehow stuck between two worlds.
None of it made any sense to us;
we wanted our pay, and some food.
Forced to dig still more holes for our
shit, we basked in the horrid stink
of ourselves no matter what we did.
It was a horrible situation – one so
delicately ‘human’ as to be inhumane.
(I wondered of this Man-God
again and again).

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