I caught lightning in your bottle,
and I swallowed it whole.
So torrid and treacherously lit,
I became the kind of something
you taught yourself to run from.
Skin tight and white hot,
I radiate light from all angles;
buzzing with fluorescence.
With my fingertips brightening
the curves of your lips,
I trace that familiar fine line
between your fear and fascination.

In a single crack across the sky,
I will set your darkness ablaze
and leave you with
a deafening boom of clarity.
Jolted and stunned, you take in
an infinite illumination,
devouring every inch of
the unknown color and wonder
once shadowed by your thick,
murky doubt.

Blink, and it disappears
as quickly as it came to be.
What you see, you can’t forget.
As the spots dance, staccato
in front of your eyes,
you run, just as you taught yourself,
fast and far, away from the light;
disenchanted once again,
as you recall the fact that
lightning never strikes
the same place twice.
the same place twice.

for all the names on that granite wall and many others...

I  Prelude

Vietnam broke my mind.
Now it runs like a cheap watch
always leaping about in time.
It pulls me backward into
strange visions of a world gone mad.
My life is time borrowed from corpses.
It is hard to lead your life
while you are stuck in another.
Time, the great healer,
only seems to make this worse.
Self-medication, legal meditation,
nothing seems strong enough
to stop the pounding of the rotors,
the screams of the men and the monkeys.
I have never been able to **** the demons
hidden in the tree lines of my mind.
Forty-three years later I'm still hiding
nauseous and naked in the napalmed jungle.
But my high mileage body clings to life:
the quest for immortality knows no shame.
Now I am a poet drunk on words,
stumbling over the illusion of art.
The more I know of language,
the less I understand life and loss.
And still the mortars rain down
in an eternal, inescapable monsoon.


II Place

Imagine a land that smells entirely of ****.
Only 70 miles wide in some places.
I flew above the abandoned bases of a war
that had been abandoned as well.
Places given up to the jungle
where 60,000 Americans died for nothing.
An implacable enemy that had fought
the Japanese and French before us
and had no doubt they would prevail.
A very beautiful place seen from the air
if no one was trying to eradicate you.
Skinny children, old women, many ******.
A place where real tigers might well
leap from ambush and eat you alive
and snakes so deadly that once bitten
you only got two steps before death.
Breathtaking sunsets and sunrises.
And the possibility of doom everywhere.
Rice paddies, mountains, triple canopy jungle.
Gorgeous beaches and an ocean laden
with sharks and sea snakes for company.
A place where death picked his teeth and smiled.


III Action

Stark terror is the mother of combat;
the rage of Peleus son Achilles
drives the soldier into the filed teeth
of impossibly horrible situations.
Not for America or the Stars and Stripes
but for the man next to you
whom you probably didn't even know.
Never ask why one man dies
and the one beside him lives on.
I shot an NVA regular from 20 feet
with a Colt Model 1911 45 automatic.
Got him exactly in the chest.
He looked very surprised to be dead.
I was surprised I didn't miss.
At An Loc a Huey 20 yards from mine
loaded with 18 hopeful human beings
took a rocket up the *** and
disintegrated into a debris cloud
of metal fragments and pink mist.
No bodies to be bothered with,
no pieces large enough to identify.
A CIA officer executing the wounded.
A tame **** torturing his countryman.
The exquisitely horrific moment when
you know you are falling, not flying.
The partner cut in half by a machine gun
five feet from where I stood.
Do not try to make any sense of this.
Fall back on the mantra: *don't mean nothing.
Cling to that and you may stay sane.
Apparently, God was busy for ten years
and never bothered to visit Vietnam.

IV Comrades

Forget that band of brothers *******,
we were more like a desperate rabble
with no one to count on but each other.
Sometimes a brother shares the blood
in your veins; sometimes you know him
by the blood that flows from his.
You scream, you curse, you try so hard
and he dies like a huge baby in your arms.
Vietnam was a club you could only join
by being there deep in the ****.
Now we are old men but our memberships
will never expire until we do.
And who will remember us then.

V Aftermath

Treated like lepers, we slunk home,
each to do the best he could.
Many died in the denouement of
drugs, alcohol, homelessness, suicide.
When I got home I wanted to be alone,
to be with people, lots of *****,
but only with no emotion attached,
an ocean of Jack Daniels, lines of coke,
mountains of ***, electro-shock therapy,
calm sleep without nightmares
and sometimes the comfort of a quick death.
Not much different than most I think.
Saigon fell. Don't mean ******* nothing.
Only some of us remember and want you to know
so you won't be fooled again.

It seems to me that your hands cannot find stable ground
they hover over soil,
not hard enough
they brush past rock
not fertile enough
they race past trees that aren’t high enough
but soar over cliff faces too dangerous to remain there for long
and your hands grow weary as they search
for a type of material with which they can make their dreams concrete

they are afraid to rest for too long
lest they forget the soft touch of grass
or the formidable strength of stone
they wish to remember all at once
While in their quest remembering nothing at all
to hold the earth in their fingerprints
to hold the earth and if not--
then nothing at all.

your hands have become weary, dear writer
let them rest
let them feel the mud between their soft nail beds
do not wash them. There is the world there, in your grasp.
You cannot let it go
even when the earth washes from the lines in your skin
it will leap back into your embrace through the air that you breathe
you were created to be its embodiment
so do not wander
you never have.