WAR POEM CANTO 7

Brothers, phantoms of the deceased,
My own brother included,
Never ceasing the mind, their haunt;
Especially, in this place of moaning and wailing,
But any place, any venue whatsoever,
As mind goes where body goes.  Thus,
There is no such thing as emotional healing – –
Just this everlasting constructing
Of new neurological corridors
To the present, as dark as it might be.

Brother gone–mind still
Not able to fathom it, not that
Any who stay now,  those who still are,
These liquified fluid men,
Really exist
(hard to fathom that as well), and
I grapple, seeking exact memories
Of him who is gone
But they too
Are blown asunder,
Whole dismembered, liquified, and strewn,
Riddled in shrapnel

And there are times, certain moments,
in inexorable grief, the dead alive in the mind,
The living fluid stuff, not substance,
I find myself falling, the weight
Of “self” breaking the shallow ice,
This tenuous construction of
Of a “me,” as it were,
To some shallow perennial fall
Instead of watery substance and depth
The way someday the corporeal
Will decompose to elements
But now after breaking the mental seal,
Falling and  energy dissolving into the air
But only for some moments and
Then, in spite, I return, despite
Not wanting to return.

We languish here
On what is more like
Hospital gurneys
Than beds–
Here where there
Is lack of food
For the weak, and where
The feckless are like
Superfluous nestlings
Denied parental rations
(Only the strongest,
Given that of substance)
Emaciated frames falling
To be ravaged by disease to
Eventually become the fodder
Of predators, like most birds.

Each singular,
Each discrete life form
So sui generis,
So anatomically,
Psychologically,
Biographically distinct
And yet,
Specialization notwithstanding,
So inconsequential
In the fecundity of life
On this plane of savage rapine
For consumption, for survival,
Whirrling violently in space

And me
Barely hovering
Above the Bermuda Triangle
Of Madness,
Barely able to brush aside
This fly hovering and landing on
This sweaty, oily countenance–
Maggots already in the infected
Bits that remain of the leg
Or so I think, but
What do I know–
Or is it even a fly?
Maybe it is a figure skater
Waltz jumping
Or toe looping
On a slush of ice
Needing resurfacing.

So is that it?
What delusionally
I thought as a “me” is
Merely
A slush of ice
A rink needing resurfacing;
But, says an antithetical thought,
Ice skaters
Don’t stay in mid-air so
It’s a fly, with flies
Having no artistic sensibilities
That are known of.

Derealized to this extent
I try to regain an “I”
The way Russia
Regained Russian
After it was relegated
To peasants
Under Catherine the Great–
English the same
Relegated by the French in England
To farmers
Before being subsumed.
But for a minute,
Maybe longer,
I was that slab of ice–
That slab of ice
Am I that still?

My brother, my brothers,
Tortured sinews,
Tortured bones
In mass graves,
Hands tied
Behind
Their backs,
How did I
Make it
Out alive
And you didn’t?
For what reason? – –
Everything random!
Corpses of sons of god
(So says the Russian/Ukranian
Orthodox church)
Decompose like trash;
Successful gestation,
Or ectopic pregnancy
And miscarriage,
Mothers who abort
Or bear it all,
All random chance.
It is all random chance:
This machine gun firing
Of sperm cells, live amunition,
at a distant target.
Whether succsessfully gestated
Whether passing
Through the first years
Of childhood,
With the stay seeming more certain,
More preordained, but
This being born is
Not borne out with guarantee
(Aeschylus dying purportedly
From tortoise in Eagle’s talon
Falling on his head)
For how long.
It could just be a day.
It could just be a moment.
It could be decades
Of auspicious existing,
Of a life, leading
To that moment of coronation
And then the next moment
The throne, and the being on it,
Pulverized in change.

There was that morning
I and my brother woke up
To the plan we concocted,
Hatched eggs
In our incubating brains.
And  Malingering, we at last
Got out of beds,
Got on bicycles,
School and paper routes
Tossed like leaves
In the winds

Conception and fulfillment equally random
Good and evil figments of the imagination
Like both sides believing in this war
From social conditioning and personal experiences, ideas
Construed and misconstrued, endlessly reinterpreted,
Worthy of being disabused,
Evermore in creation and destruction
Reconstructed again.

And for twenty kilometers or more
On gravel roads
We rode on,
Resting at times
Under pine, birch, and oaks, their
Mushy seeds, and
Twigs and grasses
All smashed between our toes,
As we ate our peanut butter
Sandwiches in the shade
They provided.
To grandmother’s house
I and my brother,  we, rode.
Memories!

The rain goes on  and on
Throughout the day
But untouched by it
It has no affect on me
And yet inwardly I am wet in
Inexorable grief  that is a
Cold perpetual rain
Splintering upon me
Through the nightish days
The dayish nights
The grey
Of the rest of my life

Little food for days
Lack of food and strength so
Barely able to brush it,
The fly, aside
Or is it even a fly
But an ice skater
And this thing,
Sometimes called a “me,”
A slab of ice
Needing resurfacing.