For Thomas Young

For Thomas Young, and for the Iraq war veterans who will kill themselves today

(According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about 22 veterans committed suicide each day in 2010) 

Strong boy, who would have thought
a bullet could eviscerate the will
to live, even without a killing. The loss
of muscle tonus in the tongue,
the anus, Pubococcygeus, and suddenly
all of your manhood starts to pour out of you
like a thrown water balloon or pitching tumblerfull
of blood. For what? Have you made safe your mother?
Freed the enslaved? Halted advancing menace?

As always, death tolls are a shell game, but at very least
110,000 were smashed between the wheels
of Tigress and Euphrates, and we shipped home 32,200
wounded. The dead are eulogized; how do we mourn the living?

I grieve your eager conscription to dust,
the Kansas City years fomenting your revenge
so that two days after the towers fell you found
the vessel for your rage, and in that vehicle five days
after you touched down Sadr City, found the lead
into your spine, where it would sink you, nine years deep.
You came to exact retribution, and left as a living tribute
to the salivating gods of Pennsylvania Ave. This year, that sacrifice
finally coming to your end. You smoke in bed, delirious with pain,
the little tube that feeds you pulled out in a mercy
which the world can almost hear, like the skirting
of savage storms which lap up this house, that house,
smashing them to flotsam in the county seat,
while we are spared in sunlight’s streaming.
Where are our girls and boys unlockstepped?
Are they afraid as they sleep in their beds?

Soon, we will have your funeral to attend and attend to.
I guess the lesson is, the body can brook mighty bedlam,
but not for no good purpose. May your shambled body be
an inspiration in its failure, just as it was in its prime.

~ by jonlib on April 8, 2013.