homeless

(written on Tuesday, February 22, 2005, early in the morning)

Come out and play, they said.
We’ll see if we can bat grenades
over the red river with the butts of rifles.
The bayonets are sheathed
so our swings won’t bloody the bases
from cuts in our bellies.

This isn’t the game I played, I said,
when wee kids wrapped a broken ball with tape
and hit it with a naily Louisville slugger
and ran paths in the grass
to laughing collisions at home.

Come on, they said.
We’ll clear a field of corpses
and run round the red sucking mud.
No, I can’t, I said.
I’ve lost my legs for running fun,
and you’ve no home to return to.

return to poetic stuff

in awful prostration

(written on Saturday, December 30, 2006, very early in the morning)

Before a rusty blood
could run out his mind
he tore away the chain
that dog-tagged his expendability
and threw it far as he could
from where he stretched his length
in sprouting leaves of grass,
their green berylled by blue domed clarity.

There in awful prostration,
that stopped his ears from hearing
the captain shout new orders
for marching to god-knows where
they’d find the next melee,
began a graceless dereliction
that outlawed his awakening.

return to poetic stuff