Fever, even now–
Of infection spread delirium, perhaps, 
Fever of war:  desperate for it
To end, for chaos to quell 
And desperate for it
To continue to rile instincts 
With boredom such a stultifying
Estivation, a fossilization so
Unfathomable
That war is requisite 
To reinvigorate bones
Of these ancient
Rural dwellers

Six months savagery
And those ravaged 
Become savages themselves, 
Become, like the aggressors,
Instinctual man once again, 
In such dark
Corridors of the mind
Where there is no light,
Only, from society,
The positive reinforcement
Of superficial platitudes of heroism 
Encouraging our atavism
As though it needed such coaxing

Let us lunge our tongues
Into the bristled brows and
The napes of necks
Of minced men, these
Fine fellows, 
Who engaged in this incursion.
Heroes, we are, we say, 
But bloodthirsty savages
No less than they are
We know tacitly in
Our oblique thoughts. 

Fever, even now
Of infection-spread
Delirium, 
Of ambivalence to war
Of natural man uninhibited 
And polished man assayed, 
Who is to say

That there is any veracity in
That which they say–
That which they say being
That the invaded,
The recipients of Russian rapine, 
Are, as defenders of a nation, heroes
As though there were
Something heroic
In flawed creatures 
Clawing back 
Like dogged cats

Pull pants down, animal, 
Anywhere in front of any one
If you have got to go you have got to go
No proprieties in war
Excrete in real time onto
The urine evaporated
Stretch of stenched land 
Raped and ravaged
In their bombardment, 
The whole obliterated
To something like a lunar satellite;
Yes my Ukrainian compatriot, 
Fellow alien, 
I found your blown off arm 
Charred amongst other charred remnants. 
Now what shall we do with it?
Landmines all around,
Look down, friend, careful where to step
Or we will be looking for another limb too

Destiny
For the human fly
Then being that which
Is able to elude the fly-swatter
For a time;
Injustices being strewn randomly like
Dead corpses and yet
We are told to clamber over them 
Insouciantly with 
Aplomb and poise.

And it was here that
One of ours
Was castrated to
An emasculated presence
As his debut
And so one of theirs the same in
Tit for tat plus– 
A similar situation
Months earlier, leading to
Castration and sodomization
With subsequent decapitation
And rot and then
The skull used as a bowl, 
Privates having hung around the man
In his last minutes, like a collar 
Before being thrown in a bonfire. 
A Russian alight
Running toward us, he being
A prisoner we made
Into a human torch

Whether war
Made us the savages we became
Or released us to the savages we were
Inherently
It was
Rape and Rapine of
Russian Imperialists 
Thrust upon us against our volition
That made it such, 
Made us fixated in
Dark neurological pathways
Of the incipient being
Innate in all
And so
Here we are
Children of the summer still
Sliding in snows of mud and blood. 

Come, medic, I need food. 
Open the curtains
I need light. 
Come roll me on my side
So I don’t get bed sores
Take away the bed tray with regularity
And at least let me suffocate
During this pandemic
Under a fresh face mask and
Not my own stench.