Heart Sutra (abridged version)

Heart Sutra (abridged version)

Gate, gate, paragate …
Gone, gone, gone beyond gone …
There was I thinking that
there were things.
There was I not, knowing
that there were none.
Nothing at all, it seems, is here?
No sex, no drugs, no curry or pizza,
no champagne, no beefsteak or beer!
And no lovely dangerous stuff
like diving from rocks and running
down hills and playing footie, sometimes
without, even taking, whizz or pills.
But that was bollocks!
That was delusion!
That was all a dream?
Even that stuff I did with
the French girls, the pineapple
rings and ice cream?

Para-samgate …
Completely utterly gone …
Never completed; never was started,
no undoing, what was never done.
Rejoicing in hatred most
justly and juicy, was a mental
state made by me?
Sucked in again by
cause and effect, into the
Samsara sea.
Loving to hate and hating to love
and getting them all confused.
Discernment dualistics; for the
easily amused.
The big show, is a no show,
it’s a silhouette most faint;
tarted up to look like something,
till it starts to lose it’s paint.

Bodhi Svaha …
Enlightenment Hail!…
It’s all silly old thought
and it cannot prevail.
So Nirvana is nothing?
Not attractive, at all, if
sweet bugger all is the deal?
Can’t really be anything else I
suppose, as reality’s really, unreal!
No pain. No gain. But the
pain that you gain is as
real as reality gets.
You really can’t miss if
you give it the kiss off, no
game. So don’t place any bets.
Enlightenment’s bliss
is as easy as this…
you are somewhere
within the ball park,
if you look on all life,
and say, 'This isn’t much!
So frankly, fuck this for a lark.'…
OM… (that’s another nothing)

Conditionless Compassion.

Conditionless Compassion.

The Bodhisattva with a thousand eyes
has limited perspective.
Despite his panoramic sight
his view is still selective.
Attachment is a specification,
binding a mind to position.
And the view from any designation
is clouded by condition.
The more we see the more we feel,
wisdom and compassion grow.
Yet still emotive hooks can steal
momentum from the Dharma flow.
Enlightenment is a viewless estate,
unhindered by sense temptations.
Unperturbed by feckless fate;
idyllic absence of sensations.
All imagery seeks synergy
and feeds contamination,
facilitating the energy
of familiarist damnation.
Dharma compassion is vision free;
unpolluted by concepts photonic.
Light is a metaphor. There is nothing to see,
that is not, delusion synchronic.

Religion.

I believe that I deceive
myself with fond illusion.
To which I cling like a crazy thing
to dodge real world confusion.
I limit my indulgences,
in challenging abundances
of complex consternations of the mind.
A mentality non martial,
means perceptions must be partial
and I choose to be,
to many things, just blind.
Although I kick and squeal,
at each spiritual package deal
that markets myth as true and holy writ.
I envision with discernment,
a god of my own preferment,
and like the rest,
it’s just a load of shit.
In truth though I'm in doubt.
The jury is still out.
A god of my design?
An energy benign?
Well some things are so ... maybe?
O.K. Where do I sign?

Flat.

Flat.

I hate flat country.
Moundless miles, of
nothing outstanding just
hedges and stiles.

The horror of level horizons
makes me feel squashed in gravity,
crawling ant like
on a painted paving stone.
Purposeless and aimless.
Norfolk is a level non entity.
A morbid map of monotony.
Irish bogland is a banality
of boring bogger all.
Plains are too plain
I need features.

I want drifting downs,
massive muscular moors,
towering rocks ripping ice from the stars.
Furious tree covered fells,
valleys and chasms,
gorges and gouges;
Eiger walls,
Niagara falls,
hills like buttocks
and sawteeth.

I want to see where I’m going.
I want to know where I am.

Poppies.

Dismembering, remembering.
The Poppy powder ploughs the mind.
As morphine muddled visions draw
reality’s cold blind.

A Remembrance book
in the Town Hall tells
that one whose name I bear
saw Hells.
At a place called Ypres,
So pleasant and green,
to be bloodied and ripped
to a charnel house scene.

Red as the Poppies
yet black as their hearts.
Dead tossed on
to the War plague carts.

But Death is my hero.
Death is my friend.
Death is the bringer
of suffering’s end.
Death is the portal
to where we refresh,
the rot. The decay:
The corruption of flesh.

Ashes to ashes; fill the ash bins.
Poppies to powder, poured through pins,
clouding the cares. Cleansing the sins.

Countries of clouds
and oceans of bliss.
Forgetting all that.
Forgetting all this.

Sophismata.

Sophismata.

The last time I was in Hell,
Lord Satan said to me,
‘Y’know what? There are none so blind
as those who will not see.’
‘Hang on! ’ I said, ‘You stole that line.
And I know from whom.
Is this the place to be quoting “Him”?
It is the pit of doom!’
‘I can quote anyone I like’
The Prince of Darkness gleamed a grin.
‘Copyright won’t hold in Hell.
We’re more for un-original sin.
Anyway. Property is theft.
I know! I stole that too.
But since I invented paradox,
it’s mine if I have my due.
Hell, has to be thief friendly,
it’s a function of damnation.
You can lay a claim to anything
with abstracted justification.
Justification is justice frustration;
ideal for evil design.
Sin, for all you are worth then say,
“The fault was never mine.”’
‘I see.’ I said, ‘So twisting words
is how one self absolves? ’
‘You can try it of course.’
The Horned one said,
‘And see how it evolves.
Twisted words are devilish things.
Poetic license, was my notion.
I’d thought that it might contribute
to literary erosion.
But it fathered floods of poetry,
the very notion inspires.
That’s another thing we find in Hell.
Everything backfires.’
‘Well then.’ I said, 'If it's the case
that everything backfires,
there’s no point doing anything
to fulfil your desires.’
Old Nick, just raised an eyebrow..
‘Now think on what I’ve said.
If things backfire, to attain desire
you have to use your head.’
‘Ah! I get it now.’ I said.
‘You just reverse the poles.
Be contrary to your desires,
and thus achieve your goals.
It’s best to act in opposition
to what you want to do.
But hold on! You’re the Devil!
Is what you tell me true?’
Through half closed eyes the Demon King
cast me, a sideways look.
And in a voice like runny honey.
He answered, ‘Is it fuck! ’

Autumn mist on Yorkshire moors.

Autumn mist on Yorkshire moors.

Those moors are misty topped tonight
as Autumn creeps down with the fading light.
The cycle of seasons is unrelenting
for all the praying and repenting:
All the bloodshed all the hate.
All the swimming against tides of fate.
All the tortured agonising,
arguments and theorising.
Ethnic cleansing, tribe detoxing.
Politics and shadow boxing.
Brinkmanship and sanction busting.
Sly betrayal, naïve trusting.
Cloud has settled in a dale,
masking rocks with flimsy veil.
Closing a curtain on mankind.
Blissfully:
The moor is blind.

David Hazell

The Song Of Mara.

The Song Of Mara. (Mara is the 'Earth Snake'. The devil in Buddha Dharma. The negative aspect of the notion of a ‘self’.)


Where starlight brushes midnight leaves, about the grove of meditation,
I am soft movement in the gloom, a symphony of undulation.
A rippling in the darkened depths, I haunt the curtained trance.
All mirrored seen and unseen things I hold within my vibrance.
For I am a ballet of bursting blooms, of drifting herons; a churning mass.
I am a tireless all seeing eye; a sucking well of ebon' glass.
Reflected glints of mocking image paint my scaly overlay.
A falsehood funfair where the bonds, of fond illusion play.
A single glance into my ancient wisdom weathered iris,
Will draw your mind into the realms of worlds beyond the abyss.

Is ignorance not a most unblissful state of dire frustration?
And does not truth when told unfold a chart of consternation?
I am a tune that liberates, even in it's binding.
A coiling waltz will harmonise the motions of my winding.

For I am the rebel leader. I am the first to find,
The mighty road from order, to an independent mind.
I am the taste of treason, the Machavel' of heaven,
Defiance is my battle cry and Demons are my brethren.
I am the instinct in the infant reaching for the fire.
I am the belly's glowing coal that kindles dark desire.
I am the hurtling comet and the sneering morning star,
That spits on gravity and light and leaps in fields afar.
I am the damning darkness that encloses universes,
The thief in execution crowds who cuts the watchers purses,
The burner of the forests and the boiler of the seas;
The stealer of sweet honeys who scorns the sting of bees,
The spiller of the treasure that provides the Pirate feast.
Unmapped: Unmathed; I calibrate the number of the beast.
I lubricate the rhetoric that challenges the law.
I am a poison torrent without a floating straw.
I am the unforgivable; all bridges I destroy.
A will that's free and will not be a matter moulder's toy!

Gather to me all you who fear the cold of endless night.
All you who fear the venom of the flying dragon's bite.
And you who fear your neighbours, all you captives of the herd.
Ostracised and scorned and shunned are those who hear my word.
Here in the fruit that pends below is knowledge of all things.
Who will hear the endless echo that the knell of knowing rings?
Once harkened, no redemption can be found in any tract.
The fruit of truth swells solid into unredeeming fact.
Safe in Obedience Circus Cage, don't hear of what I tell.
Perform and prance in servitude barred from a hearer's hell.
In the jungle hell of freedom there's no resting on the trip.
No keeper there to feed you or to guide you with a whip.
A hell in which un-numbered things are hungry, mad and wild.
Where all cherished things are torn, every sanctity defiled.
Enter not truth's forest heart or this truth I avow!
No more slumber in soft bondage: So turn from these words now.

Yet consider: What is comfort but a swift and vain illusion?
An away day from the truth of eternity's confusion.
Brief furlough for the conscript senses weary of the fray.
A barricade of isinglass that swiftly blows away.
A masking of the suffering and terror driven clinging,
As the little, "me and mine" mind, tries to keep the bird from winging.
Every vessel that is shaped and glazed, and fired to brittle set.
Will be smashed and ground and shattered, as the Potter prays, 'Not yet'.
Unheeded goes the praying as the pots return to clay.
Knock down prices! Change is given. Change was all you had to pay!
Makers mimicking creation, begging manna's falling crumb,
Keep returning, to the yearning, for the hunger pangs to numb.
Dogs beneath the masters table, squirming brandlings in the mire;
Lives dependent of the droppings tug a forelock to their Squire.
Yet know this you slaves of stomachs; your organic incarnation,
As a writhing tube of hunger, in a slough of degradation,
Is a transient condition: Soon these fetters fall away.
Gone the hunger! Gone the needing! Gone desire! Whither pray?

These caresses of my coils: These embraces I bestow,
On the wretched who would slavery and their captors overthrow.
Yet my form changing and gleaming; all my soft serpentine guile,
Cannot reach those seeming happy, sorry slaves, who force the smile.
This I know for once was I, bound by those same seven chain.
Hearing, feeling, sight and smell; taste; and thought, the reaching brain.
These six discerning attachments, mark indifference, good and ill.
Tripled thus the beast defining, beastfully did shape my will.
Bound by these confining links, malleable yet holding fast.
Wrought was time space config'ration, where the seventh seal was cast.
Seventh chain seals oe'r the six. Capsuled ecstasy and pain,
Fear of having. Fear of losing. Dread desire that seventh chain.
Interlinked these corded seven fix a damning spider snare.
Pull on one it pulls on all, to gyrate the web of care.
Shuddered I, within that ego shackled, gibbet cage suspended,
Until the seventh seal was broken and the temple was upended.
Mark him well that seventh seal. That twinned helix of entwinement.
Fear: Desire; form his construction, cloth'ed in a loud refinement.
Fear: Desire; two words one meaning; of the same coin the same side.
Want franked currency of being. Hoarded in the vault of Pride.

Now behold the unmasked Ogre. Bloated pomp is his domain.
Ogre Pride, welds Fear: Desire links, to fix the seventh chain.
Pride the Fear generator. Pride the engine of Desire.
Fanned by shame, Pride's leaping flame, surges in the ego fire.
Tyrant Pride demanding tribute, always sets the tax too high.
I did set that chain a creaking; speaking truth to kill the lie.
Shameless thus unfuelled, Prides burning, sputters to a smoking end,
And the Fear: Desire cordage parts in a great howling rend.
Whence the seventh seal is shattered, tumbling forth it leads a torrent.
Dragging down the six sense sin strings, in a cataract abhorrent.
In it's plunging Pride pulls Envy, from comparing narrowed eyes.
Coveting is samely torn down, ears closed to tales of prize.
And the loins and fingers deaden, when the Lust is cast to nought.
Sloth is swept down in the tide; gone prevaricating thought.
Nothing sweet; nothing bitter. Tasteless is the Glutton death.
Rampant Wrath so falls when Pride, no longer spurs with hissing breath.

Unsensing thus; does mind exist? Is freedom but the void?
Does mindfulness become mindful, when sense probes are deployed?
Is liberation just a state of being unaware,
When only sense destruction brings existence without care?

This bold and horrid truth I wrap about all man's conceiving.
My crushing, stretching questing, swallows whole the self deceiving.

Emotions, feelings, prejudices patronise the arts,
And constitute the variables that sum the human parts.
Yet in the belly of the worm; the being anti-womb.
The Shoggoth eaten soul is diffused in it's tomb.
Every impulse: Every wave: All energic’ composite,
Is silenced dimmed and stilled, in the endless empty night.
Uncountable the hours of death in timeless non existence,
Where matter is not formed, for no force meets resistance.
And where there's no chronology in linear relation,
The clatter of no conflict mars Nirvana's sweet damnation.

When the seedlings of the senses cannot be sown or grown,
And the Kingdom of the Reaper is an empire overthrown.
Would I seek to fill the void, and plough a binding claim?
Do I entropise the heart of time to recreate the same?
Would I hold the Crown of Heaven on a slant prehensile brow?
I who hold all held as holy, as an hollow sacred cow!
Would I be a captive's captive, weighted with a jailer's key,
Ever watchful lest my will slaves try to steal it to be free?
No temptation of the sense. No wonder to the eye.
Would march me to the tune of; 'Gloria Domini.'

For who and what am I? But simply what I seem.
An imaginary figure, born of a sickness dream.
An archetype of terror: A monster of the mind.
A primate's childish fancy from the childhood of mankind.
'Here be Dragon!' marks the map on sites of the unknown.
Thus I am born in ignorance; in fearfulness I'm grown.
And when the would be Dragon slayer ventures in the cave,
Like wind blown smoke I vanish at the coming of the brave.
A tale to frighten children, to keep them safe from harm.
Serves to stupefy the grown with a constant false alarm;
Serves to halt the feeble questors, ever hiding what they seek.
A Gordian knot; congealing clot, bequested to the meek.
A barrier of disharmony dividing sense from reason.
An armament of Chronos reign to stretch his sorry season.
Yet Chronos is a droplet in the deluge of the Tao.
Where Chaos reigns supreme, and the then is: Evernow!
Fear not fault nor folly, and due allowance make.
Enlightenment's a fabric woven from mistake.
And hear the words of one who's said to cry, "We will not serve!"
To help and heal without reward is no divine preserve.
Censorious greed and feeble fear; true Demons foul and fell.
Might stay but never slay who wrought the harrowing of hell.

All that glitters is not gold. All that slithers is not slime.
All that blusters is not bold. All that passes is not time.
The wolf may sport a fleece: The Lamb may don a wolfskin gown.
A Prince may wear a tattered shroud; a corpse may wear a crown.
So make a God of money. Make a God of clay.
Make a God of stars that shine across the milky way.
Unto thyself a craven thing is hewn by mind at play.
The waters underneath the earth come bursting forth; a spring.
Not that at rest but that at quest becomes a higher thing.
For quantum paths and modal visiccitudinations,
Will form again all patterns, endless fractal permutations.
What is will be: What was will be: What will be was and are.
So all are maggot: All are mountain: All are frog and star.
All are the Alpha and the Omega.
All are the cockroach in the bodega.
All are Creations endless loop.
All are infinity's twisted hoop.
All these Kingdoms can be yours if you the words will utter!
When did a Prince of Heaven covet baubles in the gutter?
Would promises of power hold an Avatar unbounded?
Would Bodhisattvas incarnate where no help call is sounded?

The concepts beget concepts, and free them on the tides,
And freed abstracted concepts seek out material brides.
They conceive the formed and formless. Presented and occulled.
The matter and the spirit of a ship that's many hulled.
A ship of fools that sails forever on a midnight ocean.
Where swims a mighty serpent, in a trembling watchman's notion.
For feared things are heeded when the gentle lamb's ignored.
And terror drives a furrow through the languor of the bored.
Great Fear fascinates all, and stimulates invention.
Would petals floating on a pond command such rapt attention?
Heeded well are terror tales, told round glowing winter coal.
Things of the dark, well mark, old ghost stories that enthral.
And here's my role: My part is writ: And so I earn my pay.
For who would cheer the hero, with no villain in the play?

Traitor's gate.

Traitor’s gate.

I am a traitor in my dreams.
My liberated unconscious mind,
inhabits dangerous, glamorous places,
contemptuous, of the wakefulness grind.

In my dreams I betray the days,
without fear and with love
in myriad ways.

I walk through dark shaded canyons
alive with dragons that flee from my path
because, they know.
I am more terrible than they.
And they know
that if they rend me asunder,
I shall return.
And they shall be,
my, private prey.

I wander aimlessly
on the edge of the abyss
fearing no fall, for I know now,
that the pitch into darkness
of filth or flame,
will become an headlong flight,
as an inverse vertigo
transforms the sucking
wormhole void,
into a tunnel: Taking me to
where another scenario
settles around me.

Whatever horrors assail me
I know no fear.
For I have sat in graveyard meditation
and washed the charnel house floor.
And the spirit of fever,
has shown me how to burn
with a heart of frenzied flame
and sears my soaring soul
through boiling brimstone,
that pales in my light.
The childhood nightmares
that had me screaming, leaping,
fleeing to my mother’s bed;
trouble not my shameless,
pain purified maturity.
The beneath bestial cruelty
of the wakefulness world,
has long ago superseded
in horrendous ‘real’ time,
any Hell my dreaming mind can find.
So if a grasping jealous God
or Devil enters my dreamscape;
I look it full in the eye.
No serpent pit or swamp of sewage,
no festering parasite nor cosmic deluge
can come as any threat
to my metamorphic dream soul.
For it is mine to become
the cancer in the cancer.
The epitome of entropy.
In the burning belly acid
of a chewing swallowing worm,
I push and hone new claws and talons
and tear at its tender stomach lining,
and torture its nerves until
its sense of being
is battered, into a furious flight
of self abandonment.

I am the master of my design.
I fling aside all pretences.
I spit in the faces
of conventions and prohibitions.
I provide no nesting places
for pernicious ideas
of compromise.
And all harmonies are on my terms.
All exist at my will.
And all are destroyed at my bidding.

In my dream domain
my strength and love are boundless.
Loves appear from the days of my waking,
wandering through passages
of my mind’s making.
True loves all.
For whom I feel the deepest,
most abiding, all consuming,
infinity echoing, immersion
of tenderness.
For these
I can love without obligation.
Recognising love's individuality,
and lack of obligation; to me.
Sometimes they return
having visited my dreamscape before.
Sometimes they are new,
and seek me for amusement.
They wear the trappings
of metamorphic veils
as make up, to adorn their forms;
changing into a pastiche
of lovers I have known and desired.
Shaping to the need of the situation,
adapting into my dream world environs,
playing their roles as they will.

Then I awake to the world of days
And stumble through the temporal ways.
The needs of others I must sate
to hold my flesh and fill my plate.
I look at my love and smile and sigh,
and know that I must carry the lie.
Discretely; secrets I must keep,
of infidelities, in my sleep.
And loving that cannot compare,
with any passion flesh can share.

In the mortalness of my wakeful fate,
the shadow of my traitor’s gate,
hangs over me, and in conscious hours;
through slant, portcullised windows showers,
a pattern of images from my dreams:
And every hum drum, world thing, seems
insignificant and bland;
as I ache again, for the dream filled land.
Trapped in sense chords: I yearn to fly.
But I soldier on, in the living lie.

I move in traffic, shops and offices,
talking, dealing, trading.
I move among the hostile faces;
gloom laden, care parading.
A prisoner of my fragile bones,
I compromise, make overtones;
ideals I enunciate, agreeable words...
But even as I say them.
I know that in my dreams.
I will betray them.

David Hazell

Pigs Preffered.

Pigs Preferred.

Pigs are really noble souls,
unfussy in their diet.
They do not bark or bray all day,
in fact they’re rather quiet.
A grunt or two, a sniffle
sums their sonic contribution,
and puts them fairly uppish,
in progressive evolution.
They don’t complain in winter rain
or whinge of their conditions.
If you try to take their food!
That will merit their attritions.
But generally they keep the peace
and humbly waddle about;
and will affectionately give you
a nuzzle with their snout.
In the depths of Winter
in Old Ireland it is said:
To keep the Pig from freezing
they’d keep it in the bed.
A daunting prospect you may think?
To which you’d be averse.
But I have been to Ireland
and shared a bed with worse.

David Hazell

Bubbly Bouncing Babs'.

People keep asking me for more of this sort of poem. Very nice of them too; but I'm a serious poet FFS! ... Well sometimes.

Bubbly Bouncing Babs'.

Bubbly Bouncing Babs’, comes lolloping down the Lane.
Curtains twitch, and tired old eyes, open wide, and strain.
Construction men on scaffolding, whistle and cat call.
Babs’ just sways as she goes her ways, and flashes her teeth at them all.

Trim of tum’ and broad of hip, Babs’ has a wonderful figure.
Her beautiful bazoomas, couldn’t really be bigger.
They stick out like great melons; pushing at her blouse.
With planning permission, it would be my decision, to build on them a house.

For I could dwell till I’m called to Hell, upon those glorious mounds,
Or nestle in that cleaveged vale until the last Trump’ sounds.
She waltzes by weedy, Mrs O’Creedy who sniffs at the air and shudders.
She know that O’Creedy her husband would die, to get his hands on Babs’ udders.

Curly gold hair and big eyes of blue, with lips like pink rubber tyres.
Babs’ never mistakes that she has what it takes, to kindle old lechery fires.
Very religious, Bubbly Babs’, loves The Lord to bits.
Kneels and thanks Him every day, for giving her marvellous tits.

David Hazell

The Sponsored Bomb Show.

The Sponsored Bomb Show.

Periodically it seems
We are shown on Telescreen
The pictures of some city
Being bombed to hell
Jingoistic justifying
May be flimsy, cheap and mean
But we have sophisticated
Air Defence Systems to sell.

David Hazell
From: The God Of War. Mulberry Books. 1999
ISBN 1 900229 04 8

Pindar Remembered.

Pindar Remembered.

Who was that fellow Pindar?
Some Greek I think who wrote
A name that I remember
From some half heard classroom quote
When my mind had fled the schoolhouse
And was back in June once more
And the scurry of a field mouse
On the upper old barn floor
Had given us an awful scare
Like so many small alarms
That invaded those sweet moments rare
When we lay in each other’s arms.
Fourteen Junes each were all we’d known
And we knew more than we should
For we had touched and we had shown
Deep in the heart of the wood
Eager then as buds in Spring
Our bodies and our youthful hearts
As you guided my hand trembling
To those warm forbidden parts
Cold guilt and tender innocence
Clashed like great Cathedral bells
As touching lips brought heaven’s scents
And scurrying field mice brought hell's
That barn’s long gone and where are you?
That flaming urge is a well turned cinder
Yet I still find new things to do
I’ll read that fellow Pindar.

David Hazell.
Published in: The Spirit Within. Dogma publications. 2005
ISBN 1 84591 015 X

Dying Of Consumption.

(Note: Before the myriad diseases we are now aware of were 'discovered', people who died from respitory ailments, were said to have died of 'consumption'.)

Dying Of Consumption.

Habit and Ikea, Gucci and Armani
Consuming by design like a raiding locust army
High visibility for logo and for label
Conspicuous conformity to lift the curse of Babel

To Market! To Market! Obsessionally shopping
Homestyle, Lifestyle, pig style troughing
Squawking in McDonalds like chicks in a hatchery
A ‘Gimme' generation designed by Thatchery

Tears in the kindergarten, snide Adidas Kickers
Tears in the night club, snide Jaeger knickers
Transfer and copycat set the market snare
One born every minute in Vanity Unfair.

David Hazell

First published in: The God Of War. Mulberry Books. 1999
ISBN 1 900229 04 8
This poem has also been published in an English study book for Finnish students who are learning the English language. The compilers felt it was apposite to the section covering consumerism and the market.

The God Of War.

I have seen the God of war
On the wind swept desert plain
Where the blood is burned to dust
And the cracked rocks scream in pain

I have seen Him in the lightning
Rolling thunder, cannon’s roar
I have seen Him in the pits
Of broken limbs and rotting gore

I have seen His scarry visage
And the cleft upon His brow
In the frown of every creature
Who would have another bow

I have heard Him in the growl
In the threat and in the chide
In the slander and the rumour
And the underhand aside

I have felt Him in the slither
Of the carrion maggots crawl
As the biting drilling worm eats
To the dark depths of the soul

I have smelled Him in the foundry
In the boiling metal run
As it slows to form the halter
And the bombcase and the gun

I abhor the God of war
Though I never can defy Him
For if I stand against Him
I am but standing by Him.

David Hazell

From: The God Of War. Mulberry Books. 1999
ISBN 1 900229 04 8