Poems: Wild with all Regrets by Wilfred Owen

My arms have mutinied against me -- brutes! / My fingers fidget like ten idle brats, / My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours. / Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease. / I can't read. There: it's no use. Take your book. / A short life and a merry one, my buck! / We said we'd hate to grow dead old. But now, / Not to live old seems awful: not to renew / My boyhood with my boys, and teach 'em hitting, / Shooting and hunting, -- all the arts of hurting! / -- Well, that's what I learnt. That, and making money. / Your fifty years in store seem none too many; / But I've five minutes. God! For just two years / To help myself to this good air of yours! / One Spring! Is one too hard to spare? Too long? / Spring air would find its own way to my lung, / And grow me legs as quick as lilac-shoots.

Yes, there's the orderly. He'll change the sheets / When I'm lugged out, oh, couldn't I do that? / Here in this coffin of a bed, I've thought / I'd like to kneel and sweep his floors for ever, -- / And ask no nights off when the bustle's over, / For I'd enjoy the dirt; who's prejudiced / Against a grimed hand when his own's quite dust, -- / Less live than specks that in the sun-shafts turn? / Dear dust, -- in rooms, on roads, on faces' tan! / I'd love to be a sweep's boy, black as Town; / Yes, or a muckman. Must I be his load? / A flea would do. If one chap wasn't bloody, / Or went stone-cold, I'd find another body.