14345144 (Veterans Day 2011)

Memory's a live gun
And these iron sights
Can take a deer from two hundred yards.

You say my memory's failing,
But I remember every blade of Korean grass.
I remember hills and ditches,
Enormous warts of earth,
Hard and silent challenge
To a disappearing sun.

You say my memory's failing,
But I remember faces you can't imagine.
Cold and friendly faces,
Faces gleaming with sweat and fear,
Faces gone utterly slack in a thousandth of a second,
Serene and infinite,
Christened with a shameless blotch of red and brown.

I remember death, coy but insistent,
Pleading in casual euphemisms
Until at last I resigned myself
And flung her meaninglessly at a thousand silhouettes.
I remember numbers grown to irrelevance,
Lead-catching chorus for my attempt
At bailing out a lake.

I remember mortars like a premonition,
Whistling with the breath of Ezekiel,
Snapping a wide canvas whip
Threaded through with the itching wool of night space.

You say my memory's failing,
But I remember the sound of bullets,
Swift and soft percussion
of overripe apples falling in the summer heat.
I remember the irresistible approach and touch,
Silken finger on flesh,
Like being kissed by a hammer.

I remember ice like mercy
Lancing through flesh, bone, and three generations,
Carving an eternal, hollow heiroglyph
Into stone souls.

I remember the drying of the Pacific,
The shrinking of the earth,
Korean relics asserting themselves in Carolina
Like a phantom limb.
I remember the placing of hands in the glyph in my soul,
Hands soft and assertive -
A final resignation to home.

You say my mind is crumbling,
But I see you like never before.
I see on you a thousand slack-jawed faces
That never will be.
I see the hole in the stone.
I see the trophy I claimed from death.
You cannot tell me I'm disapppearing.
I am in you eternally,
Resting in your shoulder,
Carved in

Like a rune

In stone.

Osama bin Laden - May 1st, 2011

Watch me take a stand

America's handing itself to us
And tonight our greedy, flag-waving hands are stretched wide,
Wide, wide open to carry a corpse -
A corpse on top of 1,100 corpses,
Ten-year-old, star-spangled corpses
Slick with sweat and grime, coarse with sand
Red from sun, blue from bleeding;
3,000 corpses white with innocence;
8,000 lost and scattered corpses
In robes brown or white as a crescent moon.

No no, really, I'm about to take a stand

On top of these corpses, a single, final one,
A capstone so we can start a new stack
As we watch, in just a few short hours,
The traffic explode
With United States secuirty.

Wait for it, I'm really about to take one

Ten years?
Ten.
Years.
1,100 lives, 1,100 stunted futures,
400 billion dollars,
And 1 dead man.

America
Too little too late?
The ten-year-old I was would have slept soundly tonight.
So why do I feel sick?
Give me a flag, I want to wave it,
I swear I do.

My legs are shaky, I'm sorry

America

Shit.