Wounded.

These are the words of which I regret least saying.
A knife disguised distantly as another tongue
singing hymns of longing that glares through the
splints of each cracked spinal cord.
Where are you? There’s bodies buried above
our walk ways - edging forward:
Yes. Let this be the ache in your
side when you look back across that bridge,
and realize it’s the one place you should never try
to return too.
Stitch that realization to you;
like skin sewn back to the body,
warfare breaking over your
bones.
Forgive me lord, but your name
tastes oddly like sweat and salt
resting lightly over lips cracked
with words, crusted to each unsmiling
face.
Beaming like a new sun. There’s constant
Hate to see the helicopters rising above,
until suddenly, the sky is blackened.
Burning; Agent Orange flickering
around us like lovers sparks, glistening
through each pore purging the humanity
from within us. Hide between the leaves
of newly dying trees. Shrubbery,
the place we continue to call home after
the flames took it for their own.
Yes. Let this be the man who saw the moon
as the last thing he could grasp at, until he
too would wake up a victim with blood on his
hands, guns shattering ear drums like
the shards of glass he, himself, had to pick out his
wife’s skull.
Patch her together, As he kneels before the
seams of a memory-
napalm blistering in the heat
hoping for once-
yes just once-
that he couldn’t squint his eyes
and see Vietnam burning
to its seams.
That this is not what it takes to survive
in a world where living is simply a parasite
we attempt to avoid catching-

Charlie spotted towards the South.
-Hush-

Dear Lord please let this simply be
a season, something we can pass through
safe and sound. Quiet, like bodies piling up
in fields of ash. White, like that space before
existence. God please-
Don’t let us wake up tomorrow and see
the entire world through the lenses
of that which burns, simply to grasp at
life;
to never
let that light
go.