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Nothing. nothing again. You leave it
like a gift received inversely, more empty
than keeping nothing in yourself – a blotch of
inwardly eaten holes, the kind bullets make
shot out in the name of giving and getting
the direction you thought best: your future
which always arrives, eventually, even now.
You brave fuck head. You honorable bitch.
Stubborn learning in the hard old ways,
after the boys all go home, each alone in
their own beds, to dream repeating memories,
misshapen as limbs that twist backward
inflicting all you justified back like a wheel,
shocked finding yourself awake at home
with hope escape is possible from that first kill.
Nothing. nothing again. You leave it
like a gift received inversely, more empty
than I can ever know. You are wrong again.
Go prove it to yourself – leave the sweat bed
out into the neighborhood and kill them all,
not personally of course, but justly to prove
taking life is a perfectly natural thing. Go!
Prove I do not understand damage, it is your
objective to achieve using the natural order
once again that death is simply a real means.
Go! Teach me the lessons of carnage you protect
all of us so nobly from having your experience.
You patriot. Listen to the neighbors
thanking you for all you did for them,
all that you sacrificed, bent and burned,
hanging from car windows, listen to them
thank you for the beautiful smoking red sand,
the sickly sweet smell of gratitude, coming
from fools who have no conception of their
own necessary words – yet you will take them
gratefully as a temporary antidote to invisibility.
Is it surprising now you are content to suffer
just as you deserve with no real hope,
just as you deserve, though you hope
one day that escape, spontaneously happens?
Oh yes, speak to me of duty, right beside
the pictures of wives, sons and daughters
pulled from the pockets of the dead, speak
to me of protecting your backs while invading
other men's homes, speak of all you were told,
all you did to be better safe than sorry, speak
in short sentenced phrases we all hear enough
to realize the emptiness of their meaning.
Nothing. nothing again. You leave it
like a gift received inversely, more empty
than a child's toy gun whose battery died.
All the children, these people, everywhere,
spouting bird squawks in mindless repetition;
and you numbly sitting there, waking at last
to the basic tragedy we call separateness. You,
with the capacity discovered to see another life
learning only the hard way you trust – you, still
absorbed by that noble excuse however distant
that locks down where you must suffer instead
alone within the wheel of memories stamped
upon every face you will ever see, you
with your found awareness - what it means for
a human creature to be alive, without words
to express the gut-wrenching, delicate threads
that manage to bind us so tenuously together.
No, of course not. Only the soldier understands
life truly as it is by knowing not just death
but the ripping of all threads holding us alive
in the name of words commanded into them.
Taken, executed and justified, even after learning
wrongness, justified like a coward avoiding
the consequences of inescapable truth.
You, daring to stand right where I am
handing me that inverse gift, less than
empty, expecting me to accept anything
you imagine yourself to be, right now,
as if your pain granted you immunity
from the task of all life; to move beyond
all we have become to discover what lies
ahead we must pass through next, seeing
from the ledge that vista we now take in.
I am not yet done, you little patriot, you bitch
wanting to be slapped to your next direction
like a test of how completely I truly care
for the damaged fuck head handing me a gift
that is less than empty – guilt rooted so down
you cannot stand to know it fully except in sleep.
Here is a rope, tie it to me as I climb. Do not
be concerned by your weight – it is nothing
I have not already lifted a hundred times before.
Here is my willing hand if you remember trust.
My heart, yours to eat, hold, or allow me to keep
both beating as long as we feel breath must last.
I never asked you to trust the reasons for war
nor the obscene spectacle of a ruler's desire.
And no, I never have killed another foe, friend
or innocent to discover the weakness of power.
Yet I know power and the cost all such illusions
exact, including the raw and pure isolation
that can never be shared – because it is the price
fruit eaten requires in the wilderness between,
in the exile outside the quiet green gardens
where a man discovers his own nakedness
in a never-ending series of flashes and blasts.
After all the boys have left, going home to
the lessons of their childhood beds, you must
realize that nothing is ever finished. You will
have no choice any more than you had before
which is the measure of true strength: belief
that all paths ahead flow from your own
determination. Sowing the seeds we all
must learn to care for, in the highest order
there is – that learning alone is our survival.
So here is your first lesson in guilt
to be placed inside that gift box
filled less than empty with your self
worth wrapped and presented. You are
an idiot just like the rest of us who,
learning late in the game your own
heart was far larger than you knew.
And this is no surprise to the poets,
or the minstrels wandering through
the generations of young, fresh men
living exactly the same sad story told
a thousand times, that you missed.
But now you know; the heart is
fundamental - because it shattered
leaving only shells impossible to fix
through any act of calculation or will.
You have learned that will alone without
a heart fully fueled is a weak force, always
striving to prop itself up, standing by acts,
a shadowed simulation engineered of righteousness
always falling short, leaving cracks, craters, dark,
deep holes that always remain less than empty.
That is your heart now, stronger than will.
I have brought you back to the garden
where vines wrap in complexity beyond
all calculation, climb naturally, where roots
reach down growing, giving nourishment
and leaves soaked with light, give breath.
I brought you here, not by any force of will
but by your own heart gathering its pieces,
ready to allow itself to form new shapes.
This earth here beneath your feet is not the barracks
where the like-minded gather to reinforce their pain
as only those who create pain can hope to share it.
This earth here beneath your feet is the far greater
substance every living thing shares as an origin
in the circle that transcends all time and space
from death in fire that makes your worst deeds pale
and your most generous act, a clumsy paw-waggle.
When you can teach the stars of patriotism,
speak to them the long lists humans believe
and perhaps they will line up in rows to follow.
Or learn, finding it best to contemplate differently
your own mass, just now discovering ignition
within the primal universal blown out that seeks
discovery of itself through each particle we are,
undisturbed in the larger dance playing out
beyond our efforts to help one another be.
