I see them still,
From time to time,
Their goofy smiles,
Their laughing eyes.
Still hear their *******,
Their growled complaints,
Their farts in the night,
from five bunks down.
The relentless joke telling,
The brotherly jabs.
Still see their sad empty eyes
When no mail from home arrives.

Oh and the lists of things
That they would do,
When back they'd go,
Into the World,
Added to daily, always growing.
Get that new Camaro,
"Set them tires on fire!",
Cruse the strip back home
and pick up chicks.
Put on their Class A,
And strut down the block.
Find that foxy girl from English class,
And make her his wife.
Tell his old man,
to actually "*******!"
We were but boys,
Too eager and green,
Posturing and playing at being men.
What I wonder, would they have become,
Given the chance to grow to a man?

Young lives cut short by ballistic pain.
So now still they linger, boys they remain,
Night visions left in the mud and the rain.

Another Day In Paradise,
The sun still below the trees,
Morning insects in full brigade
Buzz and bite our ears and face.
Walking a staggered formation,
Our eyes every where.
No one talks, we only stare,
Grim faced and scared.

"198 days and a wake up",
Keeps running through my head.
The air always, so thick and damp,
Lays like a wet blanket on my lungs,
Every breath takes more effort.
The Corpsman assures me,
"take some aspirin" I'd be fine.
Man, I hate this ******* place!

There are moments,
When beauty can be seen,
When the population
Viewed from a distance,
Seems less threatening.

If only their sing song high pitched
speech did not grate on my ears,
Like ******* finger nails raked,
Repeatedly cross a black board,
In forward and reverse!

The kids are kind of cute,
But always with a
Hand in your pocket.
Hell, even they got to live,
It's merely their Rice Bowl
Needing a fix.

I often wonder what this place,
might be like without the war.
How different it would be.
Maybe some kind of Paradise.
What the **** are we even doing here?
It's a complete ******* mystery to me.
No one ever bothered to ask my opinion,
I'm only a lowly grunt, not entitled to one.
A ground pounder with a *******.
Counting the days 'till I ******' split.

Emerging from the trees and tall grass,
Steps down into warm water and mud.
Another ******* rice paddy!
My feet are ****, always wet and sore.
My thighs and crotch forever in rash.
****, I do so hate this place.
"Hundred ninety eight days and a wake up,
On the Freedom Bird, back to the world."
Forever a mantra in my brain.

The ******* bordom is almost as
bad as the fear of being in the ****.
Those times are fleeting, over quick.
The rest is routine, a grind to endure.
Seems endless 'cause it ******* is!

Like the sharp crack of a whip,
One snaps past my ear!
Coming then like a swarm of Bees,
Announced by that God awful,
Chatter those A-Ks put out.
*** holes and elbows dispersed,
All of us on the run, looking for cover.
They got us boxed in cross fire,
No place to run, no spot to hide.
Hunker down in the mud,
Throw out some rounds,
And kiss your *** goodbye!

Return fire as best we can,
Spray the trees where we reckoned they be.
Mortars' now, crash and splash!
Earth erupts and mud explodes.
Some guy down the line screams in pain.
Dear God I hate this ******* place!

Do you ******* hear me God?
198 days and a wake up call,
And I'm out of here!
**** I'm only 19,
I ain't no martyr and don't wanna' be!

                    END


Jungles, deserts it's all the same,
kids pulling triggers and dying in vain.
When will we ever learn?

Sorry for all the usage of "That F word" but
that is the real deal among young Marines
in the field. Profanity is their punctuation.
Part of the swagger needed to pull the trigger.

In the darkest days of our humanity
I often wonder why we thought not
To turn on the lights
Why we condemned wrongs and injustices
To small rooms
And only entered them through back doors
Why the judges of damning deeds
Didn’t dismantle the decay done by guilt
And instead locked that guilt away
Not erasing it but not affording it the right
To catharsis either.
Keeping it in the dark leaving it to fester in and from itself
Why not expose guilt?
I asked
Then thought it strange the answer was in the question
Who does that help?
When has the airing of guilty feelings brought on by damaging deeds
Benefitted the one who owns no stalk in guilt
It is the guilty it helps
It clears their conscious and frees their soul
But so
If theirs is the one tainted shouldn’t it be they
Who have to live with guilt - a punishment
That doesn’t have a casualty count.

The ordinary man
Is always, in part, the villain.
The supporting role for the hero’s story-
They are never adorned with
Fangs or ominous and dark eyes
Their evil is much more insidious
Subtle but complex
Within a man that could easily
Pass for the hero himself
If his bad days did not over shadow the good
If he did not so strongly hold steady
His own beliefs
So that he felt bound to bind them to others
We are all part hero and villain
What casts us in our role as one or the other
Is if we act on the small part of us
That fights to the death for our beliefs
In the face of the popular opposition.

Glitter Rain shimmers outside my lightning window

            and winds a dream—weather of dreams and nightmares,

            a reign of indifference somewhere in between the windowpane,

            the widow pain, and the windy plain—to whisper possibilities

            into the nice night of nostalgic friends, wishing friendships hadn’t

            ended, knowing it had to end, glad it did end, ignoring the ending

            of all this time, ticking away in the timely thunderstorm of the



night.

...

Viktor Aurelius read four of my poems on Whispers in the Dark Radio, a horror poetry show.

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