Horse-men

By John Thampi

All the hard lessons
my father could have taught me
I learned chasing wild
Horse-men eating daggers in the desert.

If you ask what lesson
I would say the one
your father hid from you
brighten your name
chai tea laced with white milk
make it easy for others to swallow
on breaking down (only at night)
grandfather’s prized cane
craven graven images
a horse for a head
steel mixed with clay (as a man should be)
bound your armored wheels
and you screamed let’s go
learning the intricacies of an ambush
dissolve in the crystalline structure of sucrose
staining the bottom of the vessel
the .50 cal hums
the butterfly trigger rises
when you wake up, raise up your son.

Wake, while it still dark
even as the saucer falls
the ceremonies ignite
a pure thirst
an end to the flare warmed nights,
echo chambers are your heart
and the wind returns the lesson
the one taught brandishing the sword with the sun
these wild horses are free men
outgunned
we learn to run.

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John Thampi was a Captain in the Military Police Corps who deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. He left the military in 2012. His writing has appeared in 9 Lines, The Rialto, Meniscus, Newtown Literary, Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre anthology, Proud to be Writing anthology, the Military Experience & the Arts. In 2019, he was selected to attend Oxford Brookes Veterans Workshop and his work featured in the Oxford Science and Ideas Festival.