The Abject Lesson (Ode To Jane Fonda)

The girl we Marines all loved until....Her Betrayal.

On a brutal bed of concrete steps

and sheets of weeping mold, he slept

curled in a doorway which had kept

the city's apathy and cops at bay.

He'd sung wine-inspired lullabies

and Sterno-laments of self-taught lies,

crooned between cackles and abject sighs,

before drifting to sleep in his vomit spray.

A manhole cover hissed toxic steam

and sewer stench invaded manic dreams

to co-conspire their fraudulent scheme

of tangible smells for horrors replayed.

He fled up and out of those memories,

awoke screaming, thrashing, and frantically

clawing at a crumbling ledge of sanity;

his rabid howls reflecting a mind's decay.

Graying strands of sweat-soaked hair

were dripping filth and hanging where

they caged a madness in burst-vein lairs

of rheumy eyes dancing demonic ballets.

He snarled his hate at the alley's blight,

threw garbage at rats over property rights

in a losing battle he fought every night,

then crawled deeper into the doorway.

At the alley's mouth, a gathering crowd

cheered a parade, smiling and proud

of a solidarity that readily avowed

support for the military on Veteran's Day.

Afghanistan Heroes and Knights of Iraq

marched to cheers and a welcoming back

from parents, sweethearts, and media hacks

of a city's choreographed morality play.

Hearing wails from the derelict's den,

people glanced from the marching men

to the doorway and rot the bum laid in,

muttering disgust before turning away.

Some caught his smell, saw clothes still wet

from booze, and mold, and vomit-vignettes,

but missed faded letters of "Vietnam Vet"

on his old Marine field jacket, fetid and frayed.

Except for a child, holding her father's hand,

whose innocence gazed at the shivering man

and at those two words she didn't understand

were this Nation's red-stamps for "Debts - Unpaid".

Her eight years of purity did not recognize

this object lesson in its Jane-stained disguise;

could see legs stumped at newspaper-wrapped thighs,

but didn't see Trust severed...and forever betrayed.

Icepoet

Author's Note

Comments and/or critiques are welcome.