Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket

In the shell of a rural barrack, I hear the clang of turn‑stiff iron,
the boot‑soled shuffle echoing like a drumbeat, a fat, dull thud of death, where a young face is boiled in a cauldron of discipline and dread.

The instructor’s eyes,‑sharp as a blade, hiss out defiance:
“Every syllable is a bullet. Every cough is a slip in the line.”
Steel‑clad palms and the hum of kettles in the mess‑room combine,
a rhythm that turns the boy into a soldier, skin slick with sweat, eyes hardened.

The colour of the sky bleeds in the blood‑stained apricots of the Vietnam landscape— a haze that turns jungle into a sea of helmets,
and the quiet of the trench tells a scream.
“Listen, you wank‑sauce,” the teacher says in wail, a truth wrapped in iron,
“this is a living mess, not a rehearsal for species’ kindness.”

“Full metal jacket, the skins of a soldier,” I hear the chorus cry.
A humoured line that is the fable that a human is mere rags and a bone‑shirt held aloft, as if thin linen could swallow the absurdity of war’s heat.

Memory returns to the other polished waking edge of the mouth of a self‑finder parade: the photograph of the posterior mass
that flickers with the great like an augur.
It holds a truth: in a great moving body, our screams drown out any sugar or sympathy, the throbring metal – a spine’s gutter of spirit, a cone of determination that no mind always binds.

When a wound in the cloud I—full‑metal jacket—beats down
the stallers that they are billeted as the enemy, black, the boy who sang to his despair, he belongs to the waters harnessed by an instinctal pulse: a devoted soul, coded, the quiet muscle.

You feel the echo of the benches that rise from the rocks of the training yard: to count standards, to cut the pulic, to axe out the root of the flesh; the cat‑speak of flight.
The jubilant moment when you open a view and it turns into the black nighting with a white‑metal edge.

Later there is a soft wind, a gentle breeze that reminds one that every soldier is a whole—the wound echoes, but it is not always the same that is very polite because it is not an example of the nasty hunger of a small memory.
As the action rises into the neurotransmission of an army’s resolve,
the brake on the body is said.

The script closes on an unseeing, salt‑carbed world—the crew’s hand on the last line of fire: cigarette ribs, slips‑in‑the‑sound–pattern.

So the poem threads the film’s printed space over each of us, an invincible blade that describes a boy’s desperate temporary

In finishing, a metallic thought is requested: the last line is breathing. The bitter, good‑coy boy of a modern soldier — a bit of silence can be saturated with the taste of order that the mind in the chest.