Ghost Jihad

Imagination will be the death of us;
It tends to run to unfortunate excess.
We all need a story
To tell and be told.
Alone I entered the world,
Alone I shall leave it.

The toppled statues,
The overthrown dictators,
Smashed and hacked and torn to pieces,
The ziggurats sacked and razed,
Babylon, Baghdad,Babylon…
American soldiers in sunglasses
Patrol the streets in armoured vehicles,
Certain only that they are not in Kansas now.
They know that their God is the real God,
And everyone else’s heathen idols.
Instead of news there are gossip and rumour,
Conspiracy theories of glorious lunacy,
Black magic for the masses.
Packs of looters roam through the ruins,
The living dead possessed by alien forces from Mars,
Diligently dismantling every connection.
And the dead-well,you remember them,-
Are just the people who were so terribly alive
A few dizzy minutes ago.
There are djinns on the loose,
Spreading havoc with ecstatic laughter;
This war is being fought
In all dimensions.

All across the city
People wake up in the night,sweating,
Dreaming that they are still in prison,
The torturer’s face looming over them.
Old skeletons and fresh cadavers
Are rising from the ground everywhere
And wild dogs gather,snarling,drawn by the stench.

In the café,old men,under faded photos
Of Old Baghdad,sip lemon tea
And inhale the perfumed narghileh,
Watching madmen fight over their city
Just as they had done in the past.

Spiky cuneiform clay tablets
Listing this man’s goats and that man’s cattle;
This desert once was Eden, red Adam’s aceldama,
The wheatfields seeded by catastrophe,
Fat sun-grains tasting of eternal life,
For which men fought each other to the death.

“Garryowen” blares from loudspeakers
As the helicopters of the Seventh Cavalry
Ascend into the air,about to fly into battle;
Just so did General Custer’s pipers
Strike up the regimental anthem,
His troopers charging to destruction
In the teeming Indian camp.

On a rooftop a marine lies prone,
Squinting down the barrel of his sniper rifle,
Named after his girlfriend;
He observes distant coordinates moving,
Ready to shoot at any second,
And feel nothing.