There is no glory in a sun that rises, drunk with yesterday’s wine and throat slit by smoked shadows.

Stranded fish, they flip and turn over, now and again but the hours have thrashed every shred of life out of them. Pain beats the school boy, pain beats the marathon runner and it kills, sometimes. Sometimes it’s a murderer.

Hear their moans, crouching, slithering, with brain pulp and blood fermented, across the walls of your mind. The beer, the shots and rum touch only the deepest cranny in your trench hole.

But it runs through you, sneaking out the back door, screeching. Like a sieve or baleen teeth and the grenade particles remain, gnawing, nibbling. Gnawing, nibbling though you’re just an empty space, detonated by vacuum, long ago.

Half-melted and crumbled, you want to flow and burn like the mercury rising to glory. Glory. It’s a word that leaves you parched with the sandstorm whipping around you.

A cup of bleach, only to clean yourself. When did you last bathe, in a rotten sea showering under the fire?