February 19, 2023

BRAD AND I

Its painful to now say it
but perhaps Uncle Sam
got it partially right when
he shaved our heads and
had us march around
Lackland Air Force Base
as the war raged on in Vietnam,
but when you talk about Uncle Sam,
the bar is set rather low.

We did all look ridiculous,
from the large guy who once
was the town bully for certain
to the once chubby guy
sadly grateful he wasn’t
in the Army, (and I’ll let you
guess which I might have been)
and if we doubted for a moment
our sameness the Sarge was
more than willing to remind us.

And since I will one day
be cremated, I take solace
in the fact that my ashes
will be indistinguishable
from those of Brad Pitt.

October 14, 2021

MASKING

The Air Force shaved our heads, was it
because of the heat of a San Antonio
summer or that we’ll all look equally like fools,
and easier for Sarge to maintain unit
cohesiveness in his rag tag band
of semi-successful Army avoiders.

Now we all wear masks and assume
we all look equally foolish, knowing
the virus cares nothing for cohesiveness,
and normal is insignia only to dreams
and at times life is shit on a shingle now.

We want our childhoods back, before
the war, before the barracks and bad
food, before expectations, and those few
imposed could be ignored at minimal
parental retribution, we want what
never really existed, it is our right.

We marched and sang “Suicide is Painless”,
never believed it for a moment, but now
we consider it in passing as we walk
down the shortening pier
into the ocean of darkness.

First published in Circumference, Issue 4, June 2021

July 21, 2021

LADDER

You have to stop and wonder,
the child said, why people
can take joy in killing, why
people can scheme each other,
why people can cheat if they can.

Birds, the child added, only
try and scheme people for food,
why they cheat for the sake
of cheating, kill for pleasure,
yet we say we are the higher species.

Perhaps, the child concludes,
it is we who are standing
on our heads, looking up
the species ladder, and we
are actually on the bottom.

December 31, 2020

MAY DAY

We marched for hours, going
nowhere really, but nowhere was
the point of the marching so we
achieved the goal the Air Force set.
We didn’t even think it odd
that they made us shave our heads,
so we’d all look like fools,
there was a war on and we
were in the military, so we
had already proven that point.
We were the smarter ones,
as it turned out, enlistees
who’d spend our time on bases
getting the pilots ready to fly
into the danger we knew
we had so carefully avoided,
and for us the greatest risk
appeared daily in the mess hall.

First published in As You Were, the Military Review, Vol. 13, 2020

December 26, 2020

HOLY

The sun slowly climbs
up onto the mountain’s minaret
and announces the call to prayer.
The waves in the quiet Lake
dip their heads watching trees
with the reverence reserved for morning.
The loon sits on the altar
and intones the sermon, the waves
stilling for a moment, then ebbing into the day.

December 1, 2020

ARE YOU CRAZY?

The birds look at us as though we had two heads. They cannot, they say, comprehend how we can stand to live in boxes, to travel in metal containers, to be stuck forever to the ground. They say that food should be picked then eaten instantly, not packaged and half thrown away. They say they cannot see how we are supposedly more evolved than they, for they have the sort of freedom about which we only talk endlessly. But most of all, and saddest of all, we know they pity us as we pity ourselves.