Tag: war

Notes from the Invasion

~ johnbrandall

1

Limited weapons, allies needed, where’s NATO?
Martial law, severe sanctions, “we don’t afraid of them.”

Sand bags and camouflage, separatist troops, conflict building.
Disrupted supplies, industrial metals and other commodities.

Interlinked energy, dependent demand. Hard assets up, soft ones down.
Leverage.  Leverage the Saudis.  You got Russia in your head.

See how Libya went?  Ukrainian wheat shipments fell twice over,
the stomach of the Middle East left growling.

It’s the Donbas, dumbass.  The president is a comedian.
They’ve been fighting in the east for eight years now.

Full-fledged operations in the Black Sea.  
Amphibious landing in Odessa,
and I don’t mean Texas.  

Shoot down the drones...


Continue reading...

A Farmer’s Almanac

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

I

Over this side
And steel.
Most moisture
We’ve seen in months.
Rusted linoleum
Tractors cowed
By the slender whim of God.
Banks?
There are no banks.

II

This is why you don’t wait.
People gonna make mistakes, sure.  But
This is p’cisely why you never wait.
Waitin’ for rain, for the aqueduct.
Waitin’ for the war to end,
For interest rates to move.
Nobody in this family waitin’ for a goddam thing.

III

Well, sure we dropped a well.
And dropped it,
And dropped it.
We found that, ah, cone of depression —
Some bottles of dirty water.
Our poor Mother, ya know.
She loaned us udders of water,
Buried deep down in her soul, like.
Sandstone-lined.  All she had.
We was just children then.

IV

So
We gone back to readin’ the clouds.
They’re beautiful really.
Cirrus curling into nothing
Way up there.  Just ice crystals
Casting down white light.
There ain’t s’pose to be such a thing as white light.
But I tell ya: I seen it.

V

I’m going on record with this
Because I’m in plain need of an elegy.
Sawbones gave me, oh, a few months.
Don’t matter much.
I came from this land
And I’m going back to it.
Now I’m telling you:
I want a Viking’s funeral.
If you can find ‘em, throw a thousand husks
Of corn onto my pyre.
Take fish from the hole I leave in the ice.
Despite everything I’ve said,
Regardless of whether there’s snow on the ground,
Whether the crops rise,
Whether anyone’s left to see me go.

Leaving an Empty Bottle of Wine Along the Windowsill of a Canal Boat

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

I.

FISA light is
          FISA light is
     knowing what you're
             knowing what you're
 thinking
      thinking.

II.

   I have been in bed
              late at night
          happy where I was.
     When I got up
           the cupboard poured me
                coffee.
        No one else was up yet,
            I was the only person awake
            in the entire world.

III.

    Moscow mule, Moscow million.
 Moscow million, I
          don't want to fight you.
   My country hasn't
                       the troops.
       Contrary to what your man
       read over my shoulder
                    on the plane —
  The soldiers are not feeling the wood, 
    they're felling the wood.
 You know,
           getting ready to write
       really old,
           long-old novels.
     Wire between their
         fingers & wire in
   their brains.   Wire, already,
   on their deforested teeth.

Continue with this poem...

Back Taxes

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

The Germans appealed World War I,
  so I was sent to the trenches,
taking my grandfather’s place.
  For days I saw no one, except
an enormous storm of a man,
  who fought for neither side,
but drove a rusted combine,
  collecting back taxes like
golf balls at a driving range.
  As his squeaking tractor scoured
the trenches he demanded,
  “Back taxes, back taxes!”

If you didn’t duck he took up
  your scalp like a head of wheat,
so I dug down, looked after
  my tomatoes and corn.
Jets, too, roared overhead, but I guessed that
  out in the distance, somewhere
amongst the farmland of old,
  large general stores lay empty,
and the highways died silently,
  trafficked only by men with guns,
in haphazard uniforms,
  beating the pavement,
burning gasoline for their fires at night.