Patriot

 This plastic patriot


This plastic patriot

Full of high pretense 

Forever angry and indignant

Suffering slights he learned in bars

His prison sentence drinking jars. 


Nothing done in all his years

But slap a back and tell some tales

And live in days obscured by time

Unwilling to accept the sunlight

That shone outside the smokey pub. 


Fighting battles of wars long over

Captured in eternal frieze 

Do anything but do his duty

To his wife with abandoned kids

First conceived when time was called. 


Such a tiny life he sought to hide

Behind the songs and revelry

And the friendships born from booze

Projecting shadows of his heroes

On the walls of public houses. 


Not content to plough his furrow

Unhappy with the mediocre 

Drink will help escape the hell

Remove the traces of the ordinary

Make a stuttering man a character. 


A wasted life flows down only

The ragged road to poverty

But perhaps it’s what he wants

To deal with savage reality

Prisoner of his own mortality. 

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