I slept upon the feathers of hypocrisy;

The word itself lies heavy on

My long-atrophied tongue.

Reveling in the self-deluding dream

Of god and country,

I joined amongst the waves that set the sun.

But now I see before me merely blackness,

Save glimpsed through booms of lightning,

Fields littered, fairly strewn.

The sight of broken bodies, bloated corpses

Slowly rotting

Is etched upon my retina in this night without a moon.

The dreadful murk directly re-descends.

Is darkness all that’s real?

I start to wonder when a blow,

A forceful shoving hand upon my shoulder

Sets me marching,

Though toward what end I swear I do not know.

Excelsior, excelsior,

All around me, men are shouting.

Cursing soft, on each breath,

This fearsome darkness, never-ending

Save those flashes;

That illumination dark as boundless death.

Once again, this damned strike of lightning.

Though the sound seems somehow different,

When a wave of nausea hits.

Now I smell the stench of newly opened horror; Bodies dead and

Not yet dying,

Blood and sweat and bile, vomit, piss and shit.

So I sink unthinking, retching, to my knees.

Rough hands emerge to pull me to my feet.

I can see now, start to see,

My very eyelids caused the darkness, all the fear has

Just now lifted,

And nothing now can stop me as I struggle forth a scream.