come friendly bombs and fall on slough!

from John Betjeman, "Slough" in Continual Dew (1937)

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death! [. . .]

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell. [. . . ]

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

honeyed sabers

from Isaac Babel, "The Road To Brody" (1923) in The Collected Stories trans. Peter Constantine (2002)

I mourn for the bees. They have been destroyed by warring armies. There are no longer any bees in Volhynia.

We desecrated the hives. We fumigated them with sulfur and detonated them with gunpowder. Smoldering rags have spread a foul stench over the holy republics of the bees. Dying, they flew slowly, their buzzing barely audible. Deprived of bread, we procured honey with our sabers. There are no longer any bees in Volhynia.

The chronicle of our everyday crimes oppresses me as relentlessly as a bad heart. Yesterday was the first day of the battle of Brody. Lost on the blue earth, we suspected nothing - neither I, nor my friend Afonka Bida. The horses had been fed grain in the morning. The rye stood tall, the sun was beautiful, and our souls, which did not deserve these shining, soaring skies, thirsted for lingering pain.

the poison dart of my personal angel of death

from Albert Goldbarth, "How I Want to Go," in Combinations of the Universe (2003)

1.
One way would be
almost without transition: water,
rising out of water,
as water, isn't aware of the moment
(well, there isn't "a" moment) it turns
to air.
          But a letter from Rich, which came today
from brambled Scottish highland, says
that the hawk can sense exactly where
the rabbit's heart is beating--is an aerothermal
system of pinpoint location--
"then it stamps its talon into the heart,
as easily as an olive is speared."
So that would be another way:
the poison dart of my personal angel
of death come down to lift me.

. . .
3.
EMO! [eey-mo]: what, one year, the "cool guys"
(jerks) in junior high kept yelling in the hallways
and covertly inking over the walls: acronymically,
Eat Me Out. It made no sense to me. First,
wasn't this command what the woman would say, not the man?
Was this supposed to be some witticism put forth
ventriloquially? And second, cunnilingus was desirable,
a pleasure--yes? Then why did this utterance
enter the world as if it were an insult? That year,
everything was confusing.
                                            For example, my Aunt Regina
was dying, making her departure
an ordeal of miscued neural paths
and failed speech, as measured in extra millimeters
per day of unstoppable, hardening cells. The cancer,
one of the doctors shrugged and said, was eating out her brain.