The steel tsunamis will froth back upwards
And become solid.
The planes will be pulled out like javelins
And slide backwards, swallowing their vapour trails.

The sunlight through the church window
Reminds us we are not angels
But that a future-like an unseen coast-
Is rushing towards us, as angels might

Atomic bombs are shadow cats
That move invisibly amongst us, like angels.

Barbed wire is the Esperanto of repulsion:
A written language of jags and scribble-
But no words-
That everyone understands

In the London Press Office, we are waiting for the news.
We are Egyptian monkeys playing with graveyard skulls,

The castle guards nothing now but summer:
Standing knee-deep in its moat, silent, like a fisherman
Among its lily pads, its frogs, its willow trees
And buzzing biplane dragon flies.

Sparrows don't want to die, either.
They paddle as fast as they can,
Away from the sparrow hawk death,
Whose wings are a shadow over the sun.

A bomber is an artist, an electric surrealist
Who sees towers as gibbets, forests as fish bones.

In the sea mist you could see the bullets in flight, in waves,
Like an invisible comb combing an invisible cat

He is England's greatest warrior, a sexual Noah
Cast ashore by the hooded gods of geological time
And aimless history

But they never notice us. Our faces are on statues.
Our barracks are the intestines of birds and fish.
Our names are long rebukes on pieces of stonework.

Perverse jukebox which always plays wrong tunes
At the wrong time: Blues at weddings,
Fast Punk at gravesides.

Here, where days once straggled through barbed wire yards
-Sharpened by fear and shaped by death-
The spring trees shout with blossom
And the cat sunshine rolls against memorials, graves.

Once great men looked like Great Men.
You could not mistake them if you sat next to them on the bus or the subway.

Perfect soldiers: here they are packed
Into their boxes like landing craft,
Each one in full armour and green crested helmet.
Strong, silent and able to keep secrets,
The World belongs to them.

Sometimes when the future seems like a cold swimming pool-
And the world a plank-
I think of everything as bombs; as steel webs of cogs and pins,
Straining to explode.

He is a conjuror.
His bullets are birds' eggs.
He cloaks the theatre in his magic smoke.
He mesmerises people. He cuts ladies in half.

He hid until the lion drought, drinking from his pool that summer
Forced him out, neither man nor machine-but something else-
Swimming towards us from The War.

You all know how he looks.
But nothing, nothing
Prepares you for the noise and the smell.

There are no roses at the end,
No raised glasses, no speeches,
As a missing person makes the world lighter,
Leaves everyone with a kind of debt.

Daily life can only bark in backyards at the stars,
But rockets and mosques point in the same direction:
Counting down in Arabic.

The flash and shake of the heavy guns' barrage
Are giant silver elephants in a tutus, thumping
Their hind legs on the horizon's black stage,
Radio City.

But Nazi rockets once looped the umbral arc:
Their nude young people oiled racist muscles and their minds;
Had television-and big families too-
But there are no Nazi Porn Stars on the Moon.

"To sit down next to a suicide bomber on the tube,
Or a bus? You'd have to be incredibly unlucky,"
Said my friend, an actuary, in the pub.

The one really useful thing I learned from the Army
Is how to say nothing when people shout in your face.
(In London, people who do this can sometimes be mad
Or carrying weapons.)

That was years ago.
Now the crows all circle. The tractor comes.
The plough opens the earth's clay volume at my page.

As the searchlights bandaged its dying air,
My mind burned with my city.

And inside all the radios, televisions and kitchens
Everyone is silent because
Smoke from these fires is a gag across the mouth of our world.

Imagine -then- the fighting on this steep crag whose fingernail top
Tries to scratch Buddha's belly, the North Star: the noise,
The smell of the unburied dead -from miles away.

Then, the pomegranate men in an armoured column:
Its metal back flexing like a centipede,
Its helicopter whiskers, its burr of drones.

Someone who dies young is like an unkept promise
That everyone waits for; whose photograph
Is like a breath that's held.

I became a Buckingham Palace guide for death.

Their wings curve as the great barrel vault arches of the sky curve,
Each seemingly carved in stone, only crooning
As swan wings croon, as if stone church angels had found voices
Among icebergs and harbours where fishing boat masts
Stroke the wine glass polar rim

And the dead awoke in the puzzled soil,
Naked and staring at the horseless earth:
Bald, treeless,
Without dung, lace or carriages;

Rectangular silences
Cushion the diamonds in bank deposit boxes.
They fill the spaces between gold bangles and girls' wrists.

I can see it through the doorless doorway, ruined,
Or the space where it should be, below the shoreline
Where the old road goes to drown its head
Below the surf in fleeces.

From a big country, in big plane,
I travelled ten thousand miles to be here,
To this bed-sized scrap,to this sick land
My world has shrunk to.

You scarcely notice it, or the framed arms factory cheques
And catalogues of prosthetic limbs. You are blinded,
Deafened by cameras and speeches.

Mars is passing in front of the Sun.
And each now has his own calendars: the private ones tacked to pulse
And fear, the public ones crucified to scales of perfection, to
Dreaming topographies; to new old languages
Exhumed from holy books, kissed into weapons manuals, thrust into
Television directed by Goya

It is through death and its sepulchres that we meet
Our other selves, the ones who stare back at us
From looking glasses; the ones walking towards us
From the future carrying dates and times.

They buried Gunner Frost beside the church
Where all the Frosts had always lain
In their high tide marks of quiet lives,
But Gunner Frost was not the same:

The Sniper is more patient than his mountain.
He has been here for weeks, imagining faces
In the clouds and rocks.

You can steal from the dead, slide
The rings and watches from their hands,
And with the self-same Rolex sweep
Their reputations, partners, plans.