This Pain I Can’t Place
This pain I can’t place
For Joe Strummer
Gentle giant, the thought
like a mother ship freedom bird
from the ocean, the word, the
sword, inflects the candor with
which he attempts to say
“I can’t do this any more.”
She longs for him to tell her
just how insane she is
so she’ll have an excuse to
self-destruct
This song is about
the luck of the colonel’s
frilly underthings he wore
under fatigues and flackjacket
at An Khe, where his brother took
a vc bullet for the end of the world,
and he balled up his
underwear and buried it
to police up his NDP.
The pain you left
on a foreign field,
the desire to rectify
catastrophes not of
your own devise,
what marks you -a diamond glyph,
gold burning through your forehead in the spirit
realm - is the intensity of your desire for truth
and to know God.
The edge split down the middle
of a falconsight’s hefting ether you insist
doesn’t exist but casts spells to bewitch me
with every damn day.