Horseshoes and hand-grenades pelt the rolling tanks
You hinder their advance with rows of twisted metal scraps
Mangled hedges made of bicycles and sharp tractor parts
Disappear like hardened moss under caterpillar tracks
Lob a Molotov and wait as their cabin starts to cook
Soon, the soldiers burst up through the hatch, gasping for air,
Then they freeze inside your rifle sights, staring with an air
Of hopeless surrender. Yeah, without their scary tanks,
They’re just boys whose mothers back home are cooking
A meal alone with the meager rations and the pork scraps,
Longing for their sons—Boys who make a couple of tracks
In the Russian snow, then come home in separate parts
When a siren winds up over the petrified city, it parts
The chilly noonday silence like a scream in the air,
And every wretched citizen stops dead in her tracks
You cannibalized a radio from one of those tanks,
But the ionosphere is stormy, so it only picks up scraps,
Scrambled chatter from the trenches: The final goose is cooked
And the last grain ground. So it’s corpses that they cook
Waifs in faded uniforms cut their buddies into meaty parts
And pass the plate around, and the dogs get the scraps,
And a fleshy, choking guilt hangs like gauze in the air
As the boys eat in silence in a field of stranded tanks
That got stuck in the depths of their own muddy tracks
You walk backwards in the snow, covering your tracks,
Stalking soldiers with your bottle-bombs, patient as a cook
Who slowly salts the helpless lobsters in their metal tank
Any fearless boy who comes rumbling through these parts
With his cannon thrust proudly like a phallus in the air
Ends up humble, crumpled on a welded floor of scraps
The country is in ruins, and you scavenge on the scraps
Every now and then, the siren stops you dead in your tracks
Fleets graze the coast; a formation lumbers in the air
But a helmet makes a skillet, and you’ve got some lard to cook
So today, dinner prevails while the city falls apart
Like the axels and the engines of the old, abandoned tanks
Mingling in the air, the scent of precious morsels cooking
And the reek of tank fuel. The potent mélange attracts
Flies that crawl on the wagon scraps and bicycle parts