The Boyes Mk 3, (they stole the blueprints) being tested by the Peoples Liberation Army in an undisclosed location just outside Taiwan
Dear poetry lover, here’s another one from Geoff, and before we let Geoff claim the line honours, we should like to publish some of the correspondence we’ve received on the Boyes anti- tank rifle and its proud heritage.
Testing the Boyes Mk 2. Forward defense for the National Centre for Resilience
This one comes to us from Gunner Gungreese, 14 M.G Coy 8th Div who writes; ‘I was readin Geoff’s poem and being reminded of the sore shoulder I got from the kick-back when we fired the bloody thing. It brought many memories back to me. Well I remember when we fired into that Jap tank and it actually stopped dead. We subsequently discovered the enemy had ran out of petrol, but it gave us hope in those dark days of Singapore. As the ‘drums of war beat again’, I yearn for the security and hope offered by these new subs, and the conversion of a row of Nissen huts in the scrub outside Darwin into a “Centre for National Resilience’!
And this one.
Historic baked beans tin, Centre for National Resilience, N.T
Having an anti-tank rifle that was not actually good at penetrating anything other than a tin of baked beans was a masterstroke of strategic planning, in as much as the new French sub fleet, ready in 2052, and the 500 million spent on the new AWM extension, ‘Frontier Wars in other Fronteirs other than our Own’ will keep any would-be agressor on guard. For they will know that to attack Australia, is to attack Australian VALUES! As it is for thinkers, members of the intelligentsia and ordinary folk who are not TRADIES! And to do so will involve a slow death by necrosis of the brain- stem’
Yours, Mike Peluzzo, Strategic Policy think-tank Asio Headquarters Canberra.
Now for something more strategic than square, the box they call Pandora. Who was she?
Fer Chrissakes dont open Pandoras bloody BOX!
Rumour heard doing a parliamentary internship with Alan Tudge.
Pandora’s Box
You don’t want to go there
Don’t want to open up that lid
Better off not knowing
The things inside, you keep hid
He bloody opened it and it’s doin him in just seconds after he bloody went and opened it!
Once let loose, you can’t escape
The corpses and the ghosts
You let them out, you’d best beware
You might escape…. almost
Laid bare the ghouls and goblins
The shades, littering your past
Nothin’ but a trail of destruction
You’d best be leavin’ fast
As a kid he was always full o fun and he could open any bloody box he desired!
Forgotten lies and secrets
They flitter and they flaunt
Dragging down tomorrow
Coming back to haunt
They mock your past, your future
Revealing all your shame
Demons, fiends and phantoms
And other things you can’t name
But Pandora snared him! This is what happens to clean living blokes who ignore warnings!
You try and try, to shut that lid
To put the creatures back
But they only serve to emphasize
The self-control you lack
But there’s no way that you can win
Can’t shut pandora’s box
The only hope, release the past
Cast away the chains and locks
Pandora’s next victim?