With the sound of sirens screaming outside,
ten knocks on the door, the shout of authority
flooding in from the red steel,
would Joe American give up Anne Frank
hiding in the attic among his dusty relics,
the crawl space shared with a family of rats,
living under the loose floorboards among
the stacks of hidden zombie apocalypse cash?

What if Jane American found Anna Franco
shuddering with her dos hermanos, madre, padre,
in the dark corners of her garage?

Would she give them 2 vests, 3 pair of pants,
two pair of stockings, a dress skirt,
jacket, shorts, lace up shoes,
wool cap, and scarf?

What if her daughter Sarah saw a black hijab Anah
patiently hidden in the foliage of their old oak tree?
Would she gift her her favorite blue fountain pen?

Would she embrace her, or if ordered,
break the neck of her rabbit?

Those  who tread the thin blue line
knows it  follows through their lineage.

Strong boys become men,
then become cops.
The rest become robbers,
the devil that stares them
in the eye for the rest of their life.

If they  are good they’ll get
their shoot out
in the slaughterhouse.

It’s hard to tell the lies of impression,  
little bits of puffery that
makes one  look good in the eyes
of a would be admirer.

One may say their name
with a French flair.
Betty becomes Bette.
Roy becomes Roy-al
with the long affected A
stretched out to tomorrow.

One may even tell the story  
about that old trick knee,
the birthmark turned war wound.

When they burn books,
in the end,
they also burn people.

Every Angel Second Class jumps into the river of
George Bailey’s despair, and after being rescued
shows everything that never should have existed, everything that was, everything that could be
contained in the Odbody of his inner existence,
the baptism, the worth and joy of all his toil.

No man gets into heaven by slaying demons,
and when Gabriel falls he follows Lucifer’s path,
never knowing that God tempered his Constantine’s
with hell on earth and the fires of suffering
that forge just a half repentant soul.

Angels are born to hover above,
have no weight but eternity,
bound to heaven yet yearning
to feel the delight of a lithe dancer,
see color, eat, drink, feel, suffer
in their own crown of thorns.

When the Angel of Death becomes Joe Black
and falls in love with George Bailey’s daughter,
asks him to be his guide to this wonderful life,
even Death will heed Jesus, make the sacrifice
and not take her to heaven’s embrace,
content forever to watch her
from first step to last.

Everything is a continuous white line
that goes on forever to the horizon
where the  next dream is always ahead.

Just you and the mustang
a body and a machine
moving through space and time.

Drive like you mean it.
Drive hard.
Drive tight.

The Mustang is a wild bronco
not wanting to be tamed,
just unleashed- and all the cowboy
can do is hang on for the ride.

The highway is a ***** slick *****,
eight miles of grit, passion, pride
and wild love that rides hotter
the wetter she gets.

At one point she becomes
weightless, disappears, and
the only things that matters
is who you are.

The stars on the flag started falling off
when Private Walker returned home
to Tennessee after six months of being
in country in Afghanistan.

At Camp Leatherneck on the treadmill
he folded five points to pentagrams,
imagined fireworks nova his welcome back.

The flag rarely flapped in the arid silence
of base camp.  Was MIA everywhere else.

He landed unmet in
Chattanooga on Veterans Day
in time to catch the parade highlights,
which happened two days earlier,
being ignored on the airport monitors  
in the hustle of terminal traffic.

No flags decorated Broad street shops,
no watchers waived the red, white and blue.
Police motorcycles fronted the parade
and patrolled the back in sunglass alert.

Two Vietnam vets shouldering hunting rifles
marched grimly in parade formation followed
by alternating school bands and ROTC cadets.

All two thousand stars dripped down,
faded blue in the rush to show the next ad.
Every which way he looked
the rushing crowd turned his back to him.

He remembered Anousheh, the girl
whose name meant everlasting/immortal.

The child who hugged him,
kissed his forehead when he gave
her a Hershey bar from
his mom’s care package
while patrolling the base perimeter road.

The friend, the daughter, the grandchild
who died in a Taliban wedding bombing,
one week after her seventh birthday,
three days after their embrace.

His heart, his tears, his breath,
his every word was Anousheh.
All was and will be forever Anousheh.

And when he prayed
he prayed like Anousheh,
and on his knees at the airport
he faced her outbound heart
and prayed for a mutilated world.

Stella remembers when  
the Zeros flew thru her backyard
and she saw Pearl Harbor in flames,
blue bodies bouncing on the waves.

Afterward, welders melted
the steel of capsized destroyers
hoping to rescue any
upside down survivors.

Her Billy drafted six months before
would fly Wildcats in the Marshall Islands
and in the Coral Seas never losing a gunner.

At Midway he launched from the Enterprise,
into a fury of collapsing sea foam and mist
part of the 233 fighter planes of
the sleeping giant squadron
filed with a terrible resolve.

The Zero bullets ricocheted
around the open back cabin
and Billy heard the loud groan
and Mike fall asleep as he
flew  on through the fog
of exploding red mushrooms.

He returned safely home to Stella
wrapped in metals and the flag.
She knew from that day that
Zeros would darken her every sky.