Young hands fumbling
through inherent motions
with graceless inexperience.
He's never done it before.

Put on a
brave face
to mask
the panicked breathing.

Sweat rolling in waves
down an unwrinkled brow.
Heart thumping loud
to escape a hairless chest.

An adolescent
still wet
behind
the ears.

His body has outgrown
the blissful freedom
of childish naivety.
Ungainly limbs,
programmed to a new purpose,
usurp that serenity.
Silent expectation.

The time
has come.
He fires
his gun.

"You're a man now, son."

But he's learnt to **** a man,
before he's even so much as
kissed a girl.

And in the morning I awoke,
sleep wearied
and bloated by experience,
to find all just as it had been but nothing the same...

The pale cast of nihilism
hung limp
over the morning's hillside
where an inconspicuous mist
had once resided.

Bless my mother's innocent
attempt to patch up my
Mind's muddied terror
with a strong tea
in her best china
by the bedside.

My boyhood mattress began
a demented laughing
in the face of brothers
with graves for beds
as I was, once again,
swamped with guilty memory
of the unheroic dead.

Those gentle youth
with minds full of
the names of wild flowers
and the rules of garden cricket
wrenched from the safe
musk of mothers
to the mud and
shrill choir of the shells.

The Air she would weep
for the loss of another pair of lungs she'd never inhabit again.
All the while, the Earth rejoiced
at the return of her creation.

That clay that once grew tall.
Outwards from the rib.
All for some fantasy and
trick of the flame.