THE GLORIOUS DEAD

my son was born on the 13th of november,

which falls on a tuesday this year.

you're not going to have a kids' party on a tuesday, right?

not in term time, right?

so we do it on the sunday, remembrance sunday of course and,

as ever, the role of jolly fellow is outsourced

to some grinning goon half my age

who gets on great with kids and whose

smile says you're a miserable prick.

this is at one of those bloody places:

you know, a unit on an small industrial estate:

soft indoor play equipment,

germs,

shrieks,

plenty of parking and

a coffee shop where the mums and dads

read their papers and

deal with

their email,

their hangovers,

the dullness of a cocaine comedown,

their caffè macchiato and

those hard, expensive little biscuits.

other people's children

and our child

do

what they do

at these places:

they slide down things,

they pretend to be zombies or

super mario or

sonic the hedgehog or

whatever and

as some young voice

shouts out this is my gun and

i'm going to shoot you,

old soldiers

and new soldiers

parade in braid

and bandages 

and pomp

and prosthetic limbs

to the sound of LADY GAGA

along whitehall

to the cenotaph,

with the commentators' words

mangled by the BBC's closed captioning

that can't keep up, so,

really i'm not making it up,

somewhere in the serious crowd

are some

SCARY TREES OF STATE.

and at the eleventh hour,

the music stops and

one of the FUNZONE goons

invites us

to join the two minutes' silence but

there's no such thing as silence in there,

and as I watch

men laying wreaths

(men who have ordered the bombing

of cities and villages

in full knowledge

of the infants

[collateral damage]

who will breathe their last

in the rubble

of their nursery schools and paediatric wards),

I fancy somewhere I can hear

my own son's voice,

SCREAMING:

i'm not your friend anymore!!!! and,

unbidden,

my great grandfather marches back

from the trenches of the GREAT WAR,

shelled into heavy-handedness,

knocking his children about (my grandmother,

my great aunt), slapping them

into pieces of vindictive shit

that take it out

on my dad,

who doesn't take it out

on me.

but when those devils from the playing fields of eton

sent market porters and stevedores

towards the mortars,

a pebble dropped

into the lives of every poor bugger's family

up and down the land and

the ripples

keep rippling,

ever fainter of course,

even now.

happy birthday to you,

squashed tomatoes and stew,

you look like a monkey,

and you live in the zoo.