Safety of War. Rob Benvie

      Published with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The publisher also acknowledges the assistance of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

      LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

      Benvie, Tigre, 1975-

      Safety of war / Rob Benvie.

      ISBN 1-55245-143-7

      I. Title.

      PS8603.E58S34 2004 C813′.6 C2004-905572-0

       As if out of a dream: gnashed teeth and fistfuls of tank-tracked mud. Shoulders of gleaming stars, chests like continents. Landscapes, snow-coated stretches. Reclining desert dunes, where terrain proves harsh and dust infiltrates all nooks. Dust in boot soles. War. Panels of skin pasted against crumbles of brick. Blood in toilets. Soldiers and ox carts. The reek of sweat against plastic, or canvas. A soundtrack swelling as opening credits roll, foreshadowing doom and apocalypse and chaos and love and disappointment. Digits tiptoeing steadily from 0:00:00. A sudden impact, then caramel spilled over Umbro shorts: a Dairy Queen Peanut Buster Parfait, engraved in memory’s stone. Trauma shuffled into slogans. Faces of proud men in lines, pixels. Helicopters splitting clouds. Gassy columns rising through drooping vines and charred branches. Smoke. Faces. A child, staring out at a boundless ocean, wondering where eternity is. The yellow eyes of a demon who breathes flame and sings in voices like howitzers. Cityscapes assailed by lightning. Speed in circuits, metal machines, cataclysmic whorls. Cities crumbling as champions sweat. Heroes in the throes of rapture, sinless. Heroes spitting and sweating. Mouths screaming, fangs tearing, howling. The battle rages. Hero as unbridled force, pounding justice into the world. Hero as harbinger of doom. Hero as geography. Hero as cartography. Bravery. Honour. Bloodthirst. Flaming cities, cartoons of panic. Heroes sneering at valour, their noses aimed at grease-slick metal and the cleaning of carbines. Oceans, storms, beer. Vast tracts of grassland, littered with land mines and fragments of bodies. Hit PAUSE, freeze-framing death’s sweeping grandeur. The hero’s strong jaw. Image as the greater ideal. Heroism as hope, as passion, as breakfast. Freeze the march of integrity’s corrosion. Years of sacrifice stagger and wobble. Shell casings lie in puddles of gore and excrement. Heroes, fighting and loving, dying with grace and unshakeable valour. Noble champions. Fathers, weeping.