baha men

OK, there's a doggie,
his tongue a black hellebore,
stroppy, fetid, delovely.
His mates, a pair of ragged clawed
rot-panting doughboys, privates among the slipped
dogs of war, unleashed by the red-muscled
horny hands of Ti-i-yme,
tear their infernal snacks from the round red bowl
marked Fido that is War. A gun, distant, a licorice
stick, bucks and births cotton, and then comes the Pop
and then Snap and Crackle, three elves yoked by their
war-hweeled sounds to the ant-marching men,
one elf (Pop) by virtue of his martial array
a bile-spitting colonel, behorsed, a god
sweeping lives with his saber blade
into the ape-faced dustbin into which
men march when their lives
are spent on trifles.
Oh! And Prometheus,
his body a dog-leg quiver, curves
over his ragged liver and calls back,
with nothing but air and frenzied spittle,
the fire that he gave that is
licorice-spat like tendons, kicking socked heel drums
into the ploughed earth.