The Beauty Of War

You know what was the strangest thing about it all?
I had finally stopped counting.
I stopped keeping track of every time
the shell fragments
whistled past my head.
I had become numb to all of it;
the panic of so many moments
set loose with paralyzing terror,
and the obsequious resignation
of the whole of humanity
to the yoke of senselessness.

I stopped hearing the agonies
of the random wounded and dying,
lifting an eternal hurricane
of hopeless shrieking voices
screaming in a maelstrom.
They pleaded and cursed.
They bargained and pledged.
They called out for acceptance.
It was too much for me to think about.
I wanted to live.

The impact hit me so hard
the kiss of oblivion atomized the universe.
This sudden gift
of freedom from the horrid world was fleeting.
A searing dawn seeped through my ragged veins.
It always comes back.
When I realized it was me,
laying at the well's bottom of my vision,
I finally understood
God sent me to hell here on Earth
and that the whole of his creation
is stiffly rooted in everlasting pain
and perpetual anguish.
Before it all diffused,
I realized it was only me
and it was all my fault.

Fathoms

They pressed his stuffed visage
on a microscope slide
under the unseeing ears
of a dandelion blossom radio telescope
parked in the bottom
of the Mariana Trench.
Baseball stitch sutures
pinch his head shut.
His cheeks are swollen with ballast.
They quiver under the weight
of ocean current covers.
In the deep dark
this shrunken headed bathysphere sleeps
on a iron bottom examination table.
They want to take the cuneiform crow hops
stamped on the silted floor of his memory
and tack it to a grand nexus
rising from the ocean floor of his thready pulse
to the ambivalent dust of the salty sky
through the double helix of a waterspout.
There is no unifying theory.
His mind is submerged beyond the sounding line.
The sea has its own agenda
so old that they can never hope to know
what it sings in the far fathoms
that only murmur on the surface
in white noise harmonies
breaking in foam against the barrier reef.
The tempest pours out of wind
in crescendos of grinding stone.
Seaweed strands knit grey shawls in the current
telegraphing the hemispheres of this globe
in scarves of stagnate neurons
hoarse from eons of shouting
out the moment that greets the hour
when the scenery is missing sky
and the facts on the ground just don't add up.
The experiment is a failure
but it won't come any harder
than the quiet that must come.

Wheatstalks

Some souls coming
some souls going
all same souls
all same souls
Listen
Listen close
You can hear
the wheatstalks cracking
on the edge of the harvester's blade...