Notes towards a new anti-war 'epic' ...

[Phil Talbot]

Altogether unnecessary,
To/2 serious sounding statesmen,
Dead fools’ posts were left open.
They were ‘wasted’, naturally.

[Phil Talbot]

Fool-father Socrates takes The Stand,
His child accused of denying The Truth,
Mocking household gods, corrupting (the) youth:
A social menace; clear enemy of The Grand.

The case against is so ‘strong’
(although it contains not a single ‘fact’)
That no one with a semblance of tact
Would dare to declare it ‘wrong’.

And so ... child and parent went to die:
Arrogant, idle, to some plain rude;
Their self-conscious folly (fully) mis-understood.
Over lost centuries their ‘happy’ voices cry ...

[Phil Talbot]

Wise confusion died with the fool.
Now (literal, present tense)
Gravity-filled heads of common sense
File through the doors of the business school.

Earnest, busy, streamlined in sharkskin/snakeskin,
Clear-headed Edmunds, patent-pated,,
Think all thoughts profit-motivated:
Ideas are for marketing, not to think in.

This school has no desks for the sweetly bitter.
One must be clear cut.
Ambiguity doesn’t sell: its shop is shut;
Commerce demands wits leaner and fitter.

[Phil Talbot]

Marking registers of corpses piled,
The death-camp commandant
Remarks that acts so ‘resonant’
Should not be lost to memory, or ‘de-filed’.

He suggests a plaque should be buried,
With every thousand bodies, to proclaim:
“Bow your heads, you mighty, in shame,
That this great act is to you denied.

We, the Master Race in name,
Did the ‘task’ from which others shied.”
“Brilliant!” The dictator cried.
No fool was there to whistle-stop the ‘game’.

[Phil Talbot]

Grim-faced, some still found cause(s) for laughter.
Watching the news child as she starves slowly and dies
(Her death edit-quickened for busy lives)
The mourners find/found dark humours offer shelter.
 
Care-weighted, they embrace(d) lightening reliefs:
Jokes feed the hung(a)ry [komickRe-Leaf?!]; quiz-facts pileup to block
Thought routes; thrill films, unlimited, unshock;
While ‘fripperies’ b.come ‘cherished beliefs’.

Fools were now of one variety,
Not wise guys in idiots’ garments,
But folly-formed, in fool raiment(s):
Mad ‘kings’ sa,sa,sa-ing by the sea(C.).

[Phil Talbot]

When palaces become bureaux,
When statespeople speak in photos,
When cabinet rooms house cost clerks,
And arguments are dog barks,
When slogans pass for free debate,
And admen the agendums dictate,
When the general’s black and white division
Is listened to without derision,
When wars are waged of ‘necessity’
And free will thought (of) beyond capacity,
Then shall the use of reason
Be hail-stormed out of. Season,
Then comes the time, for those who live it,
To resurrect a foolish spirit.

[Phil Talbot]

This ‘prophecy’ he could not make, for he died to miss his funeral wake.

[Phil Talbot]

‘1940’, by Laurence Thompson [with a ‘P’], published 1966 ...
Chapter 1, ‘Gate of the Year’
P9, ‘1940 began quietly’ [partly because of ‘noise restrictions’ regulations], so there were ‘muted’ celebrations [including a brief ‘knees up, mother brown.  - ‘that half-tamed relic of the Bacchanal’]
TheDark. The UnderGround.
P10, distrust of ‘authority’. celebration of ‘bloody-mindedness’
[in part, because of non-occurrences of ‘massacre from the air’ (apocalyptic images that haunted pre-worldwar2 sub-consciousness(es) ... eg, Baldwin: ‘bomber will always get through’... eg, bombing scenes in films such as Things to Come ... eg, Picasso’s Guernica ... etc ...
Consider also ‘Bomber’ Harris’s monomaniacal belief in ‘war-winning’ massacres from the air ... even when reality showed many survived even massive bombing raids ... & tended to ‘bolster’ rather than reduce ‘anti-them’ moral(e) ..,
{Of course ... dreaded possibilities seemed to become  realities in ‘last scenes’ of ww2 ... ‘mere oblivion’... ‘sans everything’ ... Hiroshima ... Nagasaki ... etc ...}]

[Phil Talbot]

... better to ‘do’ it out/on the fictional, rather than the ‘real’ ... that way no one got hurt/killed ... pt.x

[Phil Talbot]

... we sat by a pond one day in autumn, being,  so we thought, questingly quarel-some, but the ‘details of dispute’ meaning ‘so much’, then, now, crowd absorbed, are forgotten ...

[Phil Talbot]

'War Porn'?
Leo Kessler, Guns At Cassino, futura publications, 1975, p37/8.
'"After the war when they start making the war films ..., they ought to show the front like it really is," one of the South T'ns said in his  almost unintelligible ... dialect. "Parts of soldiers lying all around, people getting shot while they're trying to take a shit - that kind of thing!"
"Yeah," another young blond trooper supported him, "and they should throw a little crap into the theatre's air-conditioning when they show it, so the civilians in the audience can smell what it is like on a battlefield too. Shitty!"
+
{James}JoyseanWurd4'battlefield':BluddenFylth/Blood&Filth ...

[Phil Talbot]

AntiWarNovels ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgx9USsw6-k