A Challenge to the World

I'm sure someone involved must have had a notion and thought this at the time. Co-written by Unexpected Formatting Difficulties and Co. Not completely a poem and the true story of a real person et al.

  


During world war two
a thirty three year old man
who was found,
after a quick,
peripheral
investigation,
to be devoid
of entity,
a scruffy,
identity-less
tramp,
irreversibly dead,
who was discovered,
located
in a country lane
somewhere,
here to remain,
undisclosed,
but,
in Great Britain,
and, after some
frenzied consultations,
was quickly reported
to the local
police.

  

Suiting their plans

with exact precision,

this body was shipped,

on ice, via night-train,

at the most extreme post-haste,

to London and to the laboratories

of the counter-espionage

unit in the fifth section

of the completely top secret,

royally appointed military commission

vested with the task

of investigating the nefarious goings-on

in the homeland community and abroad into the international beyond, of the enemy, (obviously).  Information gathering, the disseminating of false intelligence and many other activities designed to, by confounding, and wounding unto death, kill and defeat the aggressor.

Written agreements

under punishment of death

were agreeably signed.

The dead man’s teeth

were checked.

Any clearly, obviously overt caries were repaired through dentistry.

His entire body was washed.

A neat military hair-cut was applied,

with assistance given to him in the barber’s chair,

each of them supporting, between them, his weight

from each, rigor-mortis embalmed against arm.

The man's beard was shaved down to leave a neat moustache. His nails were scrubbed clean in a tub of hot soapy water and manicured. His entire body was examined and every detail, in minutiae, was recorded.

   There was a tattoo of a woman’s name inside a heart on his right shoulder.

   He was photographed and dressed in the military uniform of a royal air force pilot, frozen solid to be defrosted one night when ordered and taken up that night in one of their planes to a height of thirty thousand feet where his new dubbin rub oiled brown gloves and lambs wool collared flight coat harness was securely fitted with a new parachute, and the bright yellow life vest inflated as the inside pocket of his dark blue flight suit was pushed full, patted, and covered over with a wallet containing his air force identification card and base pass, his driver’s license, a used London bus ticket, a semi-

completed letter to the woman named inside the heart on his shoulder tattoo, and a photograph of a pretty young woman with a message of love from her, penciled on to it on the back, plus, a special bonus package of conspicuously, well-considered and craftily concocted, completely false, officially secret documents, containing orders detailing the major points of the plans for the invasion of France by the sum total of the entire British allied forces.
 

   By night, his corpse was then saluted, and thrown from their plane, his parachute opening to drift him down and into the known path of an enemy vessel most certainly to be traveling shortly in the direction of the location estimated correctly to be the sector of the sea where he was expected to land and float, whilst drifting.
 

   I have brought you here today to show you this.

This is his picture. Here are all of his children’s children. These are the teats upon which he suckles. Tender, an apple cheeked youth with eyes flashing, aglow, with the vigor of fresh life. By twilight, he enters an unlit room. Does anyone know his name? Does anyone still know him?

  

   For here, stands his tombstone, and here, does he lie.

Reviews

[Brett Hernan]

...and no more 'know who him' either, at view 9, and I am going to bed.

[Brett Hernan]

Apologies to the first three, (and probably any other) readers as I quickly edited the last stanza and relocated a comma in the last line, improving it.
I did not mean to rip you off.