From the Eyes of Silent Soldiers

Excerpt from Across Missouri’s Back and into France.

Out into the fire of dawn we walk.

Hand on fingers, heads down and distant.

In the distance vultures circle, crowslead starving wolves to bodies no one

cared to bury.

Ash coats every nose hair, taste bud;

Everything now looks gray in sunlight,

'cept the dusty redness of passerby eyes

and swollen lips. Rubble lies whereroofs once rose, old phallic stabs at god

now flaccid monuments to man's unerring selfish

destruction.

Had we not been duped into

the folly of blind science, wemight have blamed this all on

god or gods, devils or demons;

 but we know our own mistakes

now: they coat our cilia likecancerettes, they've thickened our 

European skin black with melanin,and crusty melanoma. Our mistakes

singe our bare eyes during daylight's peak,

itch and bleed under scars from heat seekingamputations and collateral accidents.

Cries which would curdle a banshees milk  break the silence of midnights where

once neon's sang of luxuries and paradise

fantasies (When all the glass shattered

in their moldings the last thing

 people thought to avoid was the air--who, we thought,

would line a packed street with tubes filled with poisonous gases?)

* * *

When the first fire lit

on the streets of New York 

it was the gypsies and vagrants

that held no surprise upon their lips.

 

Gucci bag men and Prada business women

leaped from sidewalks and cars,

gang-bangers and street merchants cried

in a hundred tongues for a reason and

a cure; only the sewer rats and pigeonsknew to leave without inquiry.

Panic grew with each blaze; eyes

and hearts of both mothers and offspring

held love only for their own survival.

War between nations bore little threat

compared to the Id battles of the suburbs.Had the enemy wanted a slow destruction,

it had only to tear the neon comfort walls

 from beneath our drooling plebeian mouths.

Voracious in our hunger for revenge

we shot our children out cannons filledwith uranium and empty promises. We

dropped vats of boiling plastic

upon all the cultures whose lips

dared whispered heresy.

When the herd begins to rouse,

uneasy of their surroundings,

in doubt of their own safety,

that's when you call the dogs:Shepherds rarely get bitten by sheep.

Bowed down like servants we watched

them tramp muddy travesty uponour ghetto roofs, let them take

our arms that we may only eat

their provided rations, looked them

dead in their politician eyes--

and cooed contently as they wove gilded

lies of peasant dreams into our eyes.It was us that lost the war before we saw

it coming. Us that laid laughing in our 

own destruction, blind of all but whathappiness they prescribed us.

Blame the blood on boorish tendencies

of greed and glory, but hold no weight

 

of Mother Justice from the shoulders

of us who sat solemn, content

within the Hellish melody of Nero'sviolin.

 Now, with hands dry as Africanmouths, we wipe oil from our eyes;

Stare out into the fire of every dawn

and shout in the language of the hopeless;We are flowers borne of ashes;

Our own prisoners of war.