The Ordinary Violence

By Matthew Parish

Monday 16 November 2026

He'd fought the Russians, more or less,

For three long years of mud and rain,

And come back west to find, he guessed,

The war had followed on the train.

Three boys, perhaps not seventeen,

With adolescent sneers and spite,

Decided that his uniform

Was something worth a little fight.

They called him names, expressed their views

On Russian greatness, Ukrainian shame,

Then took his telephone away,

As though the world were just a game.

He asked for it. They laughed at him.

One spat. Another raised his chin.

He'd seen that look in older men,

And knew the foolishness within.

What happened next was very brief,

As such transactions often are:

Three boys discovered that a man

May learn some lessons from a war.

A bloody nose, a broken tooth,

Some bruises blooming into blue.

He took his telephone again

And wondered what else he should do.

He might have called the local police,

Explained the merits of his case,

But found the prospect rather dull

With someone's blood upon his face.

And so he walked towards a bar,

Where soldiers drink and women smoke,

And thought about the sort of world

In which a fist becomes a joke.

For violence, he knew, was cheap,

A currency that never failed,

In streets where law had grown quite thin

And half the decent men had sailed.

At checkpoints, stations, market stalls,

In arguments about a fare,

A sudden hand, a shouted threat,

A sense of menace everywhere.

He'd seen a colonel strike a boy

For failing to salute in time,

And watched a drunkard kick a dog

Without considering it a crime.

The war had taught them how to kill,

But not precisely when to stop.

A nation could defeat the world

And still have thugs in every shop.

Those boys, he thought, would tell their friends

How soldiers beat the young for fun.

They'd leave out how they stole his phone,

And who had first elected violence.

He knew the tale would make him sound

A bully in a soldier's coat,

While they became the injured youth

Whose suffering deserved a vote.

And this, perhaps, was what depressed

Him more than any battlefield:

That every blow could make a truth

Which no one afterwards would yield.

He'd fought to keep his country free

From men who worshipped brutal power,

And found himself obliged to use

The same old language for an hour.

Of course he'd had to get it back.

Of course the bastards needed taught.

But something in the easy ease

Of hitting them disturbed his thought.

How quickly civilised restraints

Grow tiresome, artificial things,

When every evening brings the news

Of bodies, drones and severed wings.

A punch becomes a punctuation,

A kick a way of ending speech.

And peace, that rather pompous word,

Retreats a little out of reach.

He finished drinking, checked his phone,

And found three messages unread.

Somebody asked him how he was.

He typed I'm fine, and went to bed.

Outside, the trams continued on,

The pavement glittered in the rain.

Tomorrow there would be more boys,

More uniforms, more fists, more pain.

And somewhere east, beneath the snow,

Men fought for what the future meant,

While here, amongst the living, peace

Was something no one quite had learnt.