Withdrawal From Damascus
By Thomas Trull
21st Century
You are too tense, old blind soldier
Snapping at children & dogs
Like a desert snake.
You steady two cocked fingers
Aimed to chastise,
Fingers that could cradle a calming
Cigarette
Had you not choked them from
The axis of allies.
***
Your forces, in their fatigues,
Are crumbling at the borders.
What use are they now,
Now that you eschew green little clouds
Now that you wander a secret garden of elephants
Now mouth has birthed too many words to tell them apart?
A campaign of pruning
A history replaced.
The man will die among his reserves
Here at home.
***
At Damascus house, we watch the hero trip acid.
His girl, nineteen, blonde, & unfinished,
Cannot escape his trajectory path.
Her disappointment occurs
Not in the present,
But in essence.
She will not survive the year.
***
What is it that we admire in the young?
To admit his youth & nothing but his youth
So hell meets God,
The endless energy to desecrate the horde culturalists,
An aspirin to eat the stomach of America,
The superhuman means to abuse & to be abused
Night stacked upon night.
Brave youth? No. The nave hand shakes danger.
We miss the proximity w/death,
We who sold our energies to time
For death to gild our bones.
