Looking for a Samaritan

I have killed a naked man, I said.
A naked man I met and killed
perhaps because his naked truth affronted me,
affronts me still, and men like me
who seldom travel naked
across this brooding land
where it is best
to ask no questions of such naked men
and better yet to act pre-emptively
in self-defence
of all that’s good and true
in this, our honest land,
where we are free
to call a spade
a spade
and where we understand the danger
of naked men we meet
somewhere on the road
from this place to that place
where every man, for all we know,
may wander naked.
But not here,
not in this great land
where we need never say
I killed a naked man. Instead,
we speak of justice done
and of our right
because we know this much for sure:

From wherever you may be (naked or not)
if your last good eye offends thee, pluck it out.


More or less, the first draft of my submission to this month's Guardian poetry workshop