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MEN LOVE WAR
(“ I don’t know what weapons men will use in the Third World War ,
but in the Fourth it will be sticks and stones”-Einstein)


Men love war. In joyous chorus
They sound the colorful call to arms
For the dubious sport of death.

They love it with undisguised love.
They parede it in the streets
Create manuals and schools
Raising flags and lowering coffins
Entoning slogans and burying songs.

Men love war. And they don’t love war
Merely with athletic courage
And military pride, but with the pious
Voice of the priest, who before the battle
-serves the Host of Death.

It was thus in Crimea and Troy
In Eritrea and Angola
In Algiers and Mongolia
In Siberia and Now.

Men love war
And can barely stand peace.
Mem love war and so
There is no danger of peace.
Men love war, profane
Or holy, it’s all the same.

Men make war their mistress
Although they’re wedded to peace.
And Lord, what ravenous pastures when they meet!
What pleasures! What screams! What moans!
What sublime pervertions schemed
In the shroud of sheets, soiling
The bed or battlefield.

For centuries I thought
War was a detour
And peace was the route. Wrong. They’re paralled
Banks of the same river, hand and glove
Foot and boot. More than twins,
Odd and even, good luck and bad,
they’re sword-swallowers,
tail-in-mouth snake, they’re ouroboros
eternally devouring us.

War is no intermezzo.
It is part of the show. And not just a tragedy,
It’s comedy two, royal or plebeian.
War is not cruelly unforeseen.
It is recidivistic vice. A rite
Full of risks. Why
It’s better than the circus:
It’s where the happy acrobat
Dressed like a kamikase
Jumps without a rope or net,
All the plates get smashed
And the contortionist breaks in half
In Death’s own Kamasutra.

But war is not the opposite of peace
It is its cradle, its complementary teat.
Horror is not the inverse of beauty
-they’re on a par. Men love the beautiful, but
they like horror in art. Horror
is not darkness, it’s counterpart of light.
Lucifer,light-bringer, is brilliant like Gabriel
And terror attracts. Nothing more attracting
-then Christ dead on the cross.

War is not, then, just a mass
That the father says, a science
That hallucinates wise, a sport
That fascinates the strong. War is art.
And so wirth the ardor of vanguardist
We attend the Biennial of Horror
And inaugurate the Bauhaus of Death.

But atop the carnage are no buzzards,
Jackals, vultures, hyenas.
Only showy heron of aluminum, serene
In their electronic ballet.

Perhaps it was the Dance of Death, pathetic.
Not so. It’s just another lesson in aesthetics.
And thus the modern soldiers
Are like doctor and engineers
And no the minister of war
Would wear a butcher’s gear.

War is war!
Said the violent invader
Raping the nun in the convent.
War is war!
Said the statue of the admiral
With his mouth full of cement.
War is war!
We say with our radar
Savoring the enemy
Somewhere north ou our resentment.

There is no nead, then, no disguise
The love of war was Patriotic Love
Of Defense of Home. We love both war
And peace-will such bigamy ever cease?
I, a poet of today, eternal Baudelaire,
You and I, mon hypocrite lecteur,
Mon semblable, mon frere.

We want battles, planes in flames,
Sinking ships, the spectacles of confrontation.
Tomorrow we’ll open up fish bellies
With a bayonet blade.
And when the trumpet plays “Soupy”
We’ll stick our pigs with knives
And pin exquisite medals on
-the dead men on the table.

Clean flesch, if posible, no blood.
Let the missile,launched from afar,
In silence, not splatter our clothes.
But if a “blood bath” it be,
Then , as Terece said:” I am human
And nothing human is alien to me.”

Death and war, in any case
Will catch me off guard no more.
I inscribe theeir effigy on the stone
As if the dice of my fate
No longer rolled on their own.
As if I passed from white
To black and back to with again
And was never in the dark.

So bring on war. Total.
Atomic trumpet blast, beginning of the end.
With caution as befits the sage
I’ll first cry out against what’s done.
But with voraciousness as befits the race
And seeing then invade my garden space
I’ll fashion from the leaves of the banana
An ideological banner
And fulminate my enemy before he can attack.

And should he not shoot back or come,
I’ll take advantage of weakling’s slipe,
Invade his house and sate my millenial cannibal-wise
Roaring behind my human mask.

-Poet, your words terrify!
(I hear someone say).
Terrified I wrote them.
Now I feel I’m free.
Death and war
No longer frighten me.
Like Oedipus perplexed
I deciphered them in my bowels
Before I was devoured
By the inscrutable sphinx.

Neither cynical nor sad. An animal
Human too, I go marching, dancing, praying
Toward the mighty carnival.
Soldier, penitent, poe

Paris, France.

Leica M4-p, Leitz 50mm 1.4 Summilux, Expired Kodak 200 Gold.


Its was my first roll of film. After the last frame I advanced the film too far. The film broke free from the canister. We were in a dimly lit restaurant. I hid it under the table and fed the film back in by hand. Hence the fire at the top and the overexposure. I learned my lesson.