When would you say no?

When would you say no?
When like Job, your livlihood is gone,
and family, house, and cute little dog?
When disease eats your skin
and you're watching the murdering of your kin
and things hurt.
worse than words.
Persecution is just a word,
but bullets and knives and lost lives,
that's...well, that is something more
and I've thought about, a lot about
what I might be in for,
and when I would say no,
but, no I don't think I will.

It'll hurt if I
lose my wife and baby girl and I
have to live with no house, outside,
but I have hope I'll see them again, and I
will not deny or hide life,
though it may mean I lose mine.

The U.S. Team vs. The Other Guys

When I was a kid, I would ask my dad to tell me stories about being in the army. He never served in combat, but he'd participated in training counterinsurgents in Panama, some of which was associated with what would eventually be known as the School of the Americas. He would explain tactics; some of which he learned in the service, but most of which I'm sure he learned from any number of historical authors recounting famous battles from Waterloo to Hamburger Hill.

I would always refer to the opposing forces as teams, as in, "Dad, what team won?" He would always correct me, and say grimly, "They aren't teams. They are armies." I didn't really catch on until I was much older and started reading books about war on my own.

I remember reading Ghost Soldiers a few years ago. It's a book about the prisoners at Camp Cabanatuan in the Phillipines and the Army Rangers who liberated them. The prisoners were survivors of the Bataan Death March, and they were dying under the brutal at worst and severely neglectful at best treatment of the Japanese Army...not the Japanese team.

I wonder sometimes if a lot of people detached from the realities of war have started to think of it as teams playing...rather than human beings killing. Those caskets landing in Delaware are points for the other guys. Hussein dangling from a rope filmed by an observer with a cell phone was like a big three-pointer or punt runback for us.

Its sick.

This "sport" is taking lives, and the ones that it doesn't take are scarred. And sometimes, rather than resting on a bench and getting ready to go back in, these players off themselves. The most recent report I can find is from May of this year. "The U.S. Army reported Thursday tht the suicide rate among its soldiers continued to rise last year, and is now nearly double the rate recorded before the invasion of Iraq." In 2007, the Army confirmed 115 active-duty soldiers committed suicide...19 per 100,000 soldiers...three quarters of whom had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. In 2002, it was less than 10 per 100,000 soldiers.

This team isn't doing a very good job of promoting morale, is it? I think the coach needs to think of some new half-time motivator in the locker room.

Killing people just isn't the energizer the movies make it out to be. Who'd have thunk it?

"Dad, tell me when the game is over."

A Lake

At the lake, our pale legs,
dangling from pier's edge,
dragging fleeting forms,
ever expanding across the
sunset drenched expanse of water,
they look owned by ghosts
alone below the blue-green
surface.
Fingers, saturated, wrinkled,
pruney, we'd call it,
flexing each digit to get
the skin to return to its
usual tautness, they'd
stretch and rest,
mine atop yours atop
the splintered wreck of a dock.
Boats like bugs skip,
and they drawl at a distance,
slowly sounding out syllables
as the wind drives them,
or quickly crashing through,
sending waves and yelps
across the distance to me
and to you, and you rest your head
on my right shoulder and forget
yesterday and tomorrow.

Sucker on a Wheeled Chair

This second
is the first chance you'll have since then
to reconnect and begin again.
Pick up your pride and pull it tight
about your lips, so pretty and thin,
like a pillow and breathe it in.
It'll kill you like cigarettes,
slowly stealing your very last breath,
and when you inhale the last of it,
you have a second to begin again.
Bend your knees at your waist,
at your shoulders, at you neck and your eyelids,
and kneel down for the softness of the carpets.
Spit that swallowed pride aside
like little bits of sunflower shells.
This second
chance brought to you not by happenstance,
but deliberate deliverance.

Oh, but I, so high on my office chair,
standing, commanding,
slide my own pride about neck,
a tidy collar, so wide and innocent?
Oh, how quickly I forget,
the wheels on this chair, and how my collar connects
to the banister, and becomes the noose
I hang myself with.

Into This Forever

Oh baby, don't you speak with sterling silver lips,
yeah, your beautiful kisses are giving me fits.
yeah, your beautiful mouth is sounding out glitz
so give me another please miss,
I'll gather flowers from a field if you feel like it;
I'll gather chocolates from a store if you want me to;
I'll comb my hair and brush my teeth three times
and, heck, I'll wear a tie that's actually tied, not clipped,
to my neck if just you would this second consider some sex.

Remember four years ago when we were driving North
Ninety-Five, that god-forsaken interstate course,
just itching for the chance to get in bed,
to get undressed, drink champagne and forget
the chaos of the life we had temporarily left.
Remember January oh seven when we got home
alone and chose to create life - or at least try,
and now Ariella is alive?
oh baby, you still have those pretty lips
and ache as I do for a kiss, I'll get you those chocolates,
or those flowers or whatever. Just to let you know:
I'm into this forever.

It's Me. Not Him.

Last night, I got there early. I turned on an amp...loud, and plugged in that maroon telecaster and played...alone. I let that A string drone and crushed the room.

I didn't need fans, just a pick, electricity, a low slung guitar, closed eyes, and God moving through me...the spirit of sound.

I etched the words you taught me on my hand with pen: You're not in the wind, You are the wind. It was me looking in the wrong places, not you hiding. Oh, how I spend so much time looking for what is there already, listening to hear hidden things in the things I hear so clearly. Instead, I should look and listen. You are there. Everywhere.

And that A drones on. God, I'm so glad I was alone because I listened to the wind for the first time in days.

Papercut: The Final Straw?

Damn you, papercut, Monday evening stupid stuff;
You're a burn but a laceration, you stupid papercut -
Now I'll be sucking at the skin between finger and thumb,
to stem the flow of copper-tasting blood,
you stupid papercut.
And the insult to the injury is the paperwork
now slightly spattered with my DNA, unwillingly donated,
done on a day I requested not to work
my stupid dumb stomach freaking hurts,
and I've only eaten a sandwich and one serving of cereal
since Saturday's epic event of throwing up three previous meals.

Damn you, papercut, Monday evening stupid stuff;
and I can't tell if this ache in my belly is nausea
or hunger or stress or...oh frick...my phone is ringing.

Jailbreaker

One morning when the sun was just above the horizon,
these two guys and I found ourselves finally outside -
heads popping from a tunnel a year and a half long,
dirt disposed of bit by bit so nothing appeared wrong.

I gotta breathe freedom deep
Feel it inflate my chest that's been so compressed;
oh prisoners, it's about time we left.

One evening when the sun was just upon the horizon,
these two dogs came in through the window near where I was lyin' -
teeth bared and gnashing hoping I fly for freedom
and the jailer hopes my flesh and blood'll feed them.

I gotta breathe freedom deep
I've been slave to my sins so long I forget
what its like to take a free breath.

And now they wanna take me back.
Well they can forget that.
Officer, I am a new man. I'm changed.
And sir, you cannot take me away.
I'm safe.