A little bit’ o Poetry! – ‘5 Ways To Kill A Man’ by Edwin Brock

I thought I might liven up the blog with a bit of poetry… I discovered this one the other day, and like all good poetry should do, it blew the top of my head off!
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‘5 Ways To Kill A Man’ by Edwin Brock
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome wayst
o kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
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In this poem, Five Ways to Kill a Man, the poet, Edwin Brock contrasts between the killings of humans at different time periods in the world. The first stanza tells of the executions in the times of Jesus. The second stanza tells of the times when knights used to duel on white horses. The German’s deadly chlorine gas attacks from World War I are described in the third stanza. The fourth stanza tells of the last part of the Second World War when the atomic bombs were dropped. Brock then, in his last stanza, tells of the last and easiest way to kill a man, and that is by placing the man in the 20th century. The five ways to kill a man that Brock describes in his poem are chronologically arranged. The most ancient way of killing was the most complicated and the latest was the easiest. The first verse reads, “There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man”, as the first is most cumbersome requiring “a plank of wood”, “a crowd of people wearing sandals…” And further, in the last stanza, he goes on to describe that killing is easy as pie (excuse the cliché), read the following lines; “Simpler, direct, and much more neat / is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle / of the twentieth century, and leave him there. This really is quite humorous isn’t it? The twentieth century has become a slaughter house, where one can hope to last a either a lengthy time, or even more so, hope for a swift existence, before one becomes just another meal for the ravages of time.
Can there be a sixth period? As we all know, time moves by in periods. After a certain period there will always appear a new one. What is important today, will be forgotten tomorrow. There is no such thing as the end of history, at least, not in art. We have had our modernist period. “But what is modern,” you could ask? It is not the end, it’s just a stage and after modernism there will be something called post-modernism. “Five ways to kill a man,” ends in our pre-modernist times, in the twentieth century. And again you could ask, “is that still modern?” Does a poem ever cease to exist? And, does it end there?

Feel free to email me, or use the comments to let me, and others, know what you think about this notion. I always appreciate different outlooks.

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