Apocalypse Now

On a river that drifts like a dream,
the colour of dusk spills over booted boots,
and the poet’s pen, half‑filled with grief,
writes the flutter of menace in the rain.

In the depths of Vietnam the sky succumbs
to a storm of orange‑iron and thunder‑beat,
the B‑52’s roar a drum, a theatre in bone,
and the jungle – a living, breathing thing.

“Somewhere, some day,” the old lieutenant whispers,
as his compass spins like a mad hare,
its needle a compass with no north to find,
if tyranny is all that remains.

An oblong of artillery, ghost‑like, rides on rapids,
shackling the sun, a blade that cuts the pulse.
–a song, a hymn of collapsed civilisation, –
yet in each syllable a child’s laughter.

The film, oh, the film, “Apocalypse Now” –
greets you, it says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Where does that smell meet the fire‑red horizon?
In a country far from the women’s boudoir of London.

The death of a man is a mutation of the heart:
suffocation of hope scattering ash to the trees,
the forest is a living monitoring device, a mind,
and the old man records his exodus: “Only… only I can do this.”

The colour of grief is almost deafening,
and the boat, engulfed in a river that remembers,
continues carrying the legacy to a quiet house,
where the landscapes line up like choreographed ghosts.

We echo the narration, “We are all infected,”
the figure flying overhead, the colour of destiny.
The punchline is that the snare is a front,
the theatre light changing the world into smoke.

In the end, war is a poem that never quite ends.
A disruption of life that drifts to a place that burns,
where the fire-lit mouths place the death within us,
and the truth is, what are we, if we’re not human?