They built the story before the battle,
hired the poets ahead of the blood,
commissioned the luminous and the golden
version of the thing done in the mud
of the actual, the advance propaganda
of the glorious and the righteous and the just,
the story of the victory already written
before the men were given to the dust,
The glory was the lie they sang us into,
the bright myth dressed in the uniform and the drum,
we marched into the manufactured splendor
of the story before the story had begun,
the propaganda is the oldest weapon,
sharper than the blade because it cuts the mind,
the glory was the lie they sang us into
and the dead are what the glory leaves behind,
Whitman catalogued the actual, the pointed,
the specific wound on the specific man,
the field hospital’s honest and unglorified
inventory of the cost of the plan
that the generals drew in comfortable rooms
with the maps that do not bleed on the table,
the cost distributed to the men in the field
with the efficiency and the fable
of the glorious told to justify the sending,
the glory the advance payment on the debt
the body pays in full without receiving
the dividend the propaganda set
as the return on the investment of the dying,
the hero’s portion of the manufactured bright,
the glory that the poster promised waiting
at the finish of the long and certain fight,
and the finish is the mud and the specific
and the unheroic and the wet,
the finish is the field hospital’s account,
the finish is the thing they don’t tell yet,
The glory was the lie they sang us into,
the bright myth dressed in the uniform and the drum,
we marched into the manufactured splendor
of the story before the story had begun,
the propaganda is the oldest weapon,
sharper than the blade because it cuts the mind,
the glory was the lie they sang us into
and the dead are what the glory leaves behind,
I have seen the recruitment poster’s version,
the jaw set clean and the eyes set true,
the uniform pressed with the impossible crease
of the image that has never been in the actual dew
of the morning before the actual,
the poster man unacquainted with the weight
of what the poster’s background holds in soft focus,
the poster man standing at the gate
of the glorious with the full conviction
of the man who has only read the story,
who has not yet arrived at the chapter
where the story stops being the glory
and starts being the specific and the counted,
the weight by weight and name by name account
of the cost that the propaganda priced below
the actual and the final and the full amount,
The glory was the lie they sang us into,
the bright myth dressed in the uniform and the drum,
we marched into the manufactured splendor
of the story before the story had begun,
the propaganda is the oldest weapon,
sharper than the blade because it cuts the mind,
the glory was the lie they sang us into
and the dead are what the glory leaves behind,
The machinery of the glorious runs
on the fuel of the young who have not yet
arrived at the chapter after the poster,
who carry the manufactured and the set
narrative of the hero and the worthy
into the field where the narrative runs out
and the actual begins its honest briefing
with the specific and the full account,
and the machine requires the gap between
the poster and the field to keep producing,
requires the story told before the arriving,
requires the glory and its seducing
of the not-yet-knowing into the going,
and I have seen the machine from both sides now,
the poster and the field and the distance between them,
and the distance is the lie, and this is how,