x

It’s all top-secret and ever so strictly prohibited.

Making it a cert that this is where

Our heat-seeking darts have their arsenals.

This must be missile mission-control

– Where we go on raids from, with our allies –

It must be – where their stealthy wings

x

Steal into bunker-thick hangers at first light.

You can’t stop near its gates, wouldn’t

Really want to take a photo, even though

You could tell them you’re only a poet

Hoping to get a true-to-life but

Lyrical description of somewhere the size

x

Of a small county – bristling with hostility;

Fenced-in by razor-wire, shielded

From spooks, from crazies, but with a bright

Blue and red playground for toddlers

Within its compound.  Here the sons and daughters

Of the military get to use the jungle gym

x

Which might be a target elsewhere, since the enemy

Are always doing that, burying weaponry beneath

Their slides and bouncy castles and so on.

Everything’s guarded by gimlet binoculars here:

Perhaps we’ve stashed some gear

Beneath that brightly spotted toadstool fortress.

x

First published in Silent Highway, Anvil Press Poetry 2014