Enemy Combatants

We hang trial less
In Basra, Gitmo, Abu Grahib, and
Uncountable CIA prisons.
Lieutenants and privates from
Britain and the grand old USA
Order us to buttfuck and
Wear a girls’ bra or
Panties on our heads.
Bound in netting or
Suspended on a forklift,
Duct tape prevents us
From murmuring Koranic verses.
After five months in solitary,
They give us their damnedest
20 hours a day.
Helmets and camouflage,
Broomsticks and chairs,
Smash our bloody faces on walls,
Knee our kidneys.
Call us gay
Sons and brothers of whores.
Strip us naked,
Heads in each others’ crotches.
Pile us on top of each other,
Hoods numbered.
Roll us in piss and shit,
Punch, kick, and sodomize us.
Standing on boxes, handcuffed,
Shackled to prison bars,
Leashed before barking dogs.
Standing inquisitional
Black hood and shroud
Electrodes running wires attached to…
Only some soldiers’ grinning notion.
Orders from above:
Guards’ green plastic gloves,
Thumbs up!  For a
Job well done.

Copyleft (CC-by-sa) 2005 by Will Doherty

Auden’s Public and Private Faces, Normality, and Prick’s Belonging

I am reading a selection of poetry by Auden.  There are only a few poems that I like so far, particularly “Too Dear, Too Vague,” “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “Request” (part 17), “Alone,” “A More Loving One,” and some fragments were shorts, such as:

Private faces in public places
are wiser and nicer
than public faces in private places.

More from part four of “Letter to Lord Byron”:

Goddess of busy underlings, Normality!
What murders are committed in thy name!
Totalitarian is thy state Reality,
Reeking of antiseptics and the shame
Of faces that all look and feel the same.

Or from Shorts:

Babies in their mother’s arms
Exercise their budding charms
On their fingers and their toes,
Striving ever to enclose
In the circle of their will
Objects disobedient still,
But the boy comes fast enough
To the limits of self-love,
And the adult learns what small
Forces rally at his call.
Large and paramount the State
That will not co-operate
With the Duchy of his mind:
All his lifetime he will find
Swollen knee or aching tooth
Hostile to his quest for truth;
Never will his prick belong
To his world of right and wrong,
Nor its values comprehend
Who is foe and who is friend.