Memorial day.

 

 

 

Ugly bald head girl.

I found your half-wig fall, Motown-Tress,

the hide of an animal I could not name.

 

Endangered, no doubt, with the

red streak Mekong

silver of a gun ship: times

Tartarus transport

 

The vapor trails to Cambodian springtime

cowers now behind rice,

odorata and thorn. I heard the beast

 

in the low shadows. That unbroken

fluttering of wings. Fennel-head

mysterious and like all love, sweet.

Am I so wrong about beauty?

 

That it slumps along until the tree tops

are ready, the jungle,

the dead well prepared until

entropy fits itself to task at

3:am. "You've held on

 

to war too long" she says. "To the

significant blood stains of metal". But

this heart of mine is not as brave as yours.

I need to be loved,

 

not held like a grenade. Which on

any day but this one,

i'd agree.

Reviews

[Tree]

You just killed that finish, been away so long I forget your trademark. Not to mention the first verse, the way you just snatch the distraction away from the reader's mind... I often think about that turbulent time, too, changed America forever.

So thought provoking, a moving read. Another/ trademark..

Nice work, brother

[Dean]

and here is truth, stared in the face, absolute, and not a hint of disputation. The war is always too long.

[Roger Turgeon]

Memories of Viet Nam...I remember waiting in my driveway as they drew birthdates to determine who would be drafted...My older brother pulled number 5, my younger brother pulled number 9, and myself patient and nervous with the engine idling...(do I drive to Canada?) ... wait until my birthday is pulled number 315!!! Your account is more first hand than mine could ever be.

[W.k.kortas]

It's interesting--oh, hellfire, it's brilliant--how you start with the bald-heded girl, which is the flesh-and-blood version of Agent Orange exfoliation. It's simply one of several well-placed references to our long, strange trip to Southeast Asia. It would be so easy for a piece like this to be some ponderous screed where right and wrong are black and white and fit nicely into boxes. This piece is a seamless and artful interweaving of life in the upper and lower case senses. As all great poems do (and make no mistake, this roars while the rest of us tick and tock) this illustrates the connection between the everyday and the universal. This poem is up in some rarified air indeed.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

"i need to be loved/ not held like a grenade"

only you can come up with lines like that...fantastic..

this really captures the dead feeling of that war, and the mistrust everyone had ...who was good and who was not..who were the enemies who were the friends...so convoluted...

and even beauty felt like a misconception...

back then all we wanted was peace and love...god, was that too much to ask for?

love this
felt this.
each word.
jacob