Flags Poem by Kevin Patrick

Their just foul rags
for feral bullets to play tag
and spray hot hopscotching volleys
all over the insides of blind patriotic marks
from fresh face battlefield ingénues
and the prized glory hounds
all are hell bound

for their school game larks


See it, cackling through the breeze
canvass flickering, at full mast
standing smug with its own malignancy
as it ascents, against the wounded day
mocking cities, towns, villages
in squares, parks, town halls and front lawns
crew cut grasses with an old ball and chain
shoulder strapped like a preacher in his pulpit
rhapsodizing his soapbox perversions:
patriots and chauvinist, endless holy wars
proudly waving, demagogue posturing
It hangs over every human settlement
and we grovel and sweat in its adornment
panting in dread as it squashes the future
and hands us a chalice poisoned for measure
then toasts us our folly, to its worship:


for its unborn wars that it will declare
and for every child that it won't spare
its hosts for anemic ideologies flung as poseurs commodities From anarchists to theocrats Its their to wave for hypocritesfor half the world it turns to rubble and the other half it keeps in bubble for all the senseless beliefs wagedare debts our lives are cheaply payed to bombs that drop in the name of god and walls built to keep out the poor old sods

and its hangs, proud, a shadow over man
a noose in four squares, for the world to see



and its coat is many colours
of different shapes and varied signs
Red, white, blue, green, black
moons, hammers, sickles crosses, stars
But peel beneath the surface of its skin
rip open the dermis of the fabric
and expose its true fabrication
and its textiles seep grievously
with the blood, guts, bowls intestines
and other miscellaneous viscera
split, ruptured and kindly disemboweled
hot screams venereal, sutured limbs hysterical
draw tourniquet in your cauterizing emblem
for the maimed, stained, and pups driven insane
are the true colours left in the cloth
and no matter what its always blood


It's a parasitical symbol
Nothing noble
Full of bells and shiny whistles
Hollow and immobile
Gutless totems
Inspired for the Puerile


Here's to the monument of old tribalism
may its rotting ensign fly laughing in our graveyards