war stories

i walked in as you were leaving
they told me i just missed you

all these actors, telling me to enunciate,
but i am not a good liar yet,
no, i am not as good at lying as they are,

and i hope it's a learning curve
because i need to pick this up —
how to manipulate my safety at the expense
of all your brilliant scripted scenes

i walked in as you were leaving
they told me i just missed you
but they were wrong;

i step up to the microphone and say,
in quiet, muddled words, the truth —
but you won't hear it clearly enough to understand,
so maybe i am a good liar after all;

i walked in as you were leaving
they told me i just missed you
but they were wrong.

try to make out the words now.
"i don't miss you.
i don't miss you at all."

actor in a supporting role

your voice was a scrawl but you kept it confined to letters that were small cramped and perpendicular.

you saw with muted vision but the rigors of insanity gave you
crazy eyes that refused to look away.

your mouth lacked confidence so you ripped it open but the slash would not align straight anymore,

and maybe it screamed so loud for medicine
all day and all night
that after a while you stopped being able to say no.

before the road. after my entire life. right between my eyes. the lips of an avenging angel.

but what i really do not want is 100 million refugees per meter of seawater.  i don't want the polar ice caps to melt all at once.  (it seems like all at once.  fifty years is nothing.  i'll still be alive in fifty years.)  but i don't want the entire urban population of the united states to get sick either.  these chemicals.  jesus christ.  how did we get involved in something like this?  the environment hands us a .22. television programs are now designed for terrorist purposes. scientists are using radio waves to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who's bored enough to listen.  what if i am not saving people in twenty years?  what if i need to be saved?  what if i never become a doctor or have a black cat or marry my wife?  what if it gets to her first? what if venice is completely submerged?  what if polar bears go extinct and riots start all over the united states, and i always admired molotov cocktails, but what if kids die?  or riot police? what if i am beaten to the ground by a nightstick?  what if the asphalt opens up beneath my bloodied temple and i am crushed between two walls of earth?  what if i am bringing a knife to a nuclear war?  what if the inevitable nuclear winter makes all this a moot point?  i can't see the world in a hundred years.  what if i'm not blind?  what if it simply 

is not there?

"one day maybe we will dance again"

striding down the victory line finding only one,
each to each but nothing more.
every time he looks at the sun he
wonders who it is he's fighting for.
that day she traced his face
and he looked away and did not say
"it hurts me when your fingers find the cracks.
my bruises use their inside voices but never turn their backs."
and the reason he closed his eyes
was so he would not have to lie
and assure her that he saw what she had traced —
the angle.
the flaw.
the shape.

ode to doyle

your voice walked with a swagger
but your eyes always showed up late
and your mouth was only good for breaking hearts.

ode to wilson (or: doo wop)

blood streaming out of his nose
he looked so wounded,
in the eyes and in the legs that once
did the charleston by the light of
the girl who looked like gold,
but now they just struggle, wounded,
and his shoulders,
too thin for uniform.

he's not going to escape them this time.
but that's okay.
he knows that
it don't mean a thing.
it never does.

killing time

sometimes when an ex-marine lays on the couch
he thinks that he sort of wanted to commit a genocide
and then he takes a sip of his beer
and he watches full metal jacket, platoon, apocalypse now,
all that shit they used to watch back in the gulf,
and his buddies don't yell at the screen anymore
or whoop at the cavalry charging in (yes
helicopters are called the cavalry nowadays)
and when that line comes up:
"i love the smell of napalm in the morning"
there is no chorus of voices speaking along with it

just his lips moving to form the words.

because there is no such thing as an ex-marine.
once a marine, always a marine.
semper fi, brother. semper fi.

his finger traces the phrase, written in ink,
across his forearm.
stretched. faded.

his lips move to form the words.

i wanna be on TV

one day i'd like to commit shenanigans under a fake name
it would be great if you came too
wearing giant fake sunglasses and acting like a douche
with an australian accent
you could also be a fake vegetarian and learn
everyone's secrets "by accident"

we could steal people's wallets and frame the tightass
who thinks he's running everything
we could pretend we were the world's number one
luge team and wear big fuzzy hats all the time
we could scale walls by throwing our jackets over the top
and after we leapt over
we would never touch the ground

blargh

i'm not digging my own grave no
dirt and pine box no moss no
my name will not erode
i am building my own
tomb out of marble and even though
michaelangelo
could probably do something fancier
mine will last for a hundred thousand years
tell people about that kid
who spent the first and last twenty years of his life
building his own tomb

you see recently i've been calling all my own shots, yeah
but at the last second
i step forward and block them with my body

every one