‘He crashed a car’, said the clean-cut man, ‘took out
Some pedestrians’. Head yawing from side to side
He wants it to sound like plain sailing, but the words
Are wont to drift off-course: ‘they were just laying there….’

‘Take out’ – a tinge of soldier talk? If so then ‘laying’
Is unconsciously NCO instead of officer class
That’s if suit-and-tie guy is the proper hard-nut in civvies
This day, when an eggshell skull cracked and made omelettes
Of passers by and tourists on Westminster Bridge.

Swivels sideways, sniffs it back in and holds
Hand over mouth for personal protection.
Still there’s a moment when he just might crumple and cry
Fingers clouding the lens – concern for his privacy
Then our Mr Clean-Cut finds his level again: ‘I’ve never
Seen anything like that.’ Like flat, pat and off he goes.

‘Blood…’ [sonorous for a second] ‘…and everything’ [now scaling down again];
For Rocky Horror’s the only show the young visitor knows to go to
With what he’s seen; he also knows it shouldn’t be.

Where conscience makes cowards of us all, he has none left.
Now what would you have him do? This sergeant’s in
An altered state, after six, long months
Killing or not killing as often as we ask him to.

Transporting an outsize parcel through green vegetation
And earth the colour purple. Going in after a ’copter strike
Usually there isn’t much left: his men are used to
DNA samples – body parts collectable for ‘biometric enrolment’.

Today the sample is much bigger: still breathing; needs carrying
Grunts sweating and swearing, under a weary life
Each four-letter syllable assaults the trudge through enemy terrain,
Hauling what’s left of a man who’s likely dying anyway.

‘Can’t believe I’m doing this,’ one of the company complains.
His sergeant responds with a nasty little noise – the nine millimetre
Pistol shot, flat (splat!), and seemingly of no consequence.
Though later it leads to a murder conviction, commuted
Last week to manslaughter on grounds of mental abnormality.

Acting in the interests of his men – that’s what they say.
Carrying out a cold-blooded execution – according to the first court martial.
Outcome of adjustment disorder, the second bench has said.
Who knows how much of which and why assume they’re separate?

The point is a man tasked every day with action beyond the everyday.
The tick and tock of his daily commute clearly heard
In the parting words fired at the Taliban prisoner:
‘There you are – shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt.’

A sentence rising high as Hamlet’s consideration of mortality,
Lying down with mingey beasts inside the beats of a bar.
This single cadence contains the gutter and the sky;
And that is the war music the piper was paid to play.

‘Let’s see y’all again, let’s see y’all again’. From behind the un-steady cam, a mock-inviting voice calls out to the convoy of pick-ups departing the family party scene in Douglas County, Georgia.

That’s July 2015. What date for the next gathering of the clan?

27 February 2017 they were due for sentencing. Namely, Kayla Rae Norton (25) and Jose Ishmael Torres (26), who had said he would shoot the little niggers at the eight-year-old’s birthday party, pointing a shotgun and waving the Confederate flag.

‘Respect The Flag’, they and their friends called themselves, tearing across half the state in half-a-dozen trucks.

Years to serve for ‘street-gang terrorism’: thirteen and six; his’n’hers, both of them banished for ever from the county.

In the 2020s they’ll be coming out to meet their grown-up children. The woman who was pogoing with fear and anger at the time of the incident, now sits head in hands at the thought of a mother parted from her kids for so long; though afterwards she says that justice was done.

‘Not me, it’s not him, it’s not me.’

Long hair pulled back untidily, elasticated face six-year stretched with crying, Norton can’t explain how it was her that day, even while admitting her it was; even when she’s nudged through the courtroom door and down to the cells.

‘Respect,’ they said; but not as in Aretha.