a life of a ghost man

It is hard to believe in a dead man,
a ghost,
a life,
a life of a ghost man….

a life that hands my limp direction
over to those that can control it.

They must have told him,
the people,
that his core was rotting,
that his brain was infested and crumbling?

That his daughter was sick with
raw nerves and would never get better?

If the bombs in Vietnam hadn’t sawed his
spirit away,

if his own father
hadn’t dangled lily liver from
the ceiling,

maybe he would have heard
the people,
the ghosts,
the whispers of his daughter’s twisted,
raw nerves grasping
for contact

and saved me from rotting with the same
crumbling infestation.

I Think I Was Never Born

I think I was never born.
My hands are a man’s whose body
escaped Vietnam, but whose
soul was eaten by a war.
I watch these hands dip
a rag in bleach to scrub away
a face of imperfections,
a face that is not mine,
but a man’s who was scalded
by the hot palms of a red-headed woman
who watched her husband
tie off his neck and give it to his son,

and now my daughter is not mine,
and her smile is not her own,
but of a woman who would have
drowned me in her breasts
had I been born,

and I watch her with
eyes that seem to be my own, but
crinkle like the skin of
a man who shrunk himself enough
to fit inside a bottle of Rum
and swim for forty years,

and I was not born, but I remember seeing
these hands wrapped around me,
and this face smiling,
and this blue eyes crinkling,

and all of these dying before
I could have been born.

Soldiers

In the beginning,
it was as if barren logs
were thrown together in heaps
for
decomposition

cautious steps
young
benumb

do you hear the bombs?

we are in belligerent land!

The Speaker is right

hazardous air hovers
stagnant
air is vacant

a perilous scent lingers
under
my nostrils
disorienting
direction

South twitches!! To the left!

Barren logs
are not!

They are
amputees!
Victims of explosive surgery,
nerves of Soldiers’ exposed;
an operating table…

God’s acre.

Soft, barren bodies
thrown together in heaps
for decomposition.

A few operative
bodies
are moved,
thrown together in heaps
for bandaging

sent home to their
wives
children
friends

with a perilous scent
still lingering
under their nostrils

disorienting
direction.