They carried the sky
on shoulders a bit too unearthly
to take root in reality.
They carried enmity and confusion
and bittersweet melodies that
were left behind in a world
that seemed ages ago.
They loved and loathed
and remembered death as posit
and considered the dead opulent.
They felt ravish for
time bombs and gun shots
and the sonance of war,
that degenerated and than
reiterated itself within the trees.
They treasured the bloodshed in
a reenactment of latent Stockholm syndromes.
They revived forgotten nostalgia --
not for the life that dissipated in story books but
instead for a song about
children shooting children.
They treasured the peace that came in labored gasps
and fragmented thoughts about dying.
They felt incorrigible and young
convalescent memories in the form of
a dark liquid slipping through fingers
like sand in an hourglass
that no longer contained time.
They loved and lost
and tried to forget the opulent dead
and considered themselves holy.
They carried apathy and phantoms
and melodies that became cloy,
left behind in a childhood
that was lived in someone else's eyes.
They carried the soil
on faces a bit too bloody
to be those of the innocent.
(Response poem to Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried.")
