a Nightowl's poetry - Hello Poetry

Nov 2015

spysgrandson

he's someone’s grandson
his body bag just like the others
viewed from the outside

inside with him
are stories, waiting to be told
over, over again by the mothers,
the mothers' mothers

who imagine they keep him
from the ground with their telling:
bassinets, bicycles, back seats with girls
finally bayonets with the boys

some of them
his buddies, beside him now
with their stories, waiting
to be told

war death bodybag generations

Nov 2015

wordvango

I see

if can never be hope
that it matters not
it is in this season
shivering early
dark

will  if ever it can ever be
more shattered  thought
without positive reason
arriving nearly
stark

may be if ever was more
the time to be distraught
with earths poisons
the cold un-endearing
heart

mighty oaks  elms still
soar ever naked bereft
a sudden more
rest in their  winter
bark

tiny ever  shudder burrow
underground left
huddle more together their
treasures can not be
forgot

ever more than ever
hope more ever will
be needed
than when
the days grow short.

Nov 2015

Jon York

Veterans Day 2010 for a Vietnam Veteran

It's been over forty  years,
but I still feel the tears from
thirteen months of combat in
a  no - win  situation called
Vietnam. The years just keep passing
by, and still many Vietnam
Veterans die, and no one wants
to admit why.
The anger and saddness is
still there and what makes it
worse  is a society that acts
as if they care, acting like
they know where we had to go
and what we had to do, and
now they just stare.

Our tears flow for our brothers
whose names are on that Wall,
the ones who answered the call
and gave all.

It is American tradition to honor
War Veterans, but they shut the
door on us and some just can't
forget.
For some better late than never,
but for me it just won't go away.

Now a whole new generation
in a different era thinks a  simple
" welcome home " will do. A
generation that is blind to what
went on, and the the injustice
that we were served,
a generation that looks the other
way when the homeless living on
the street try to speak .
A generation that ignores the number of
Vietnam Veterans taking their
own lives every day.
The shock of this is so much,
I  just don't know what to say.

Some of us choose to live another
day and this new generation
honoring us needs to know
that we will not just go away and
that they will have to deal with
us someday, giving more than
just a " welcome home" that
comes a little late, and they need
to know  why our minds are in such
a f*^k^d   up state.
                              Jon York  USMC Vietnam  1969 -70

,

Nov 2015

Joe Cottonwood

Moose Brain, No Moral

Timmy Ray, poor boy from Kentucky.
Football scholarship.
Degree in Business Administration.
Respectable job, bored.
Enlists with best friend in Marines as a macho trip.
Vietnam, what a crock.
This ain’t football. And it ain’t fair.
Schemes to get out,
ignores an order to go out on patrol,
******* mission, but the friend goes,
gets shot up bad.
Timmy Ray runs out to help the friend, is shot.
It’s all blood and mud, man, blood and mud.
Friend paralyzed, Timmy Ray okay.
Court-martial for Timmy Ray, discharge.
The friend takes an overdose.
“No moral here,” Timmy Ray says. “My
war story. That’s all.”

Timmy Ray makes sculptures, big metal things.
No people.
“The human body’s been done,” he says.
Downtown Detroit in front of an office
he welds a pile of globes,
names it “Love” so he’ll get paid
but he says it’s really “Moose Brain.”
These days, Timmy Ray’s hand
trembles. He volunteers at a suicide
hot line. No moral there,
either. Moose brain.

#war #art #moose #vietnam #sculpture

Nov 2015

Mike Essig

Vietnam Suite

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.

Forget the past and it will bite you in the ***. Some stories demand to be told and heard. Like slavery, Vietnam will haunt America until it recognizes the great evil that was done. Evil can never be wished away.

#war #history

Nov 2015

Mike Essig

Vietnam

Mostly, I remember
the red dust;
red like the blood
that won't wash off.
~mce

To the lost...

#war #memory

Oct 2015

Mike Essig

A Little Prayer

"I'd strike the Heavens if they struck me!"* - Ahab

Dear god, just a few questions
(I know how busy you are):

Where were you when the stray bullet
found the skull of the little girl
in the sandbox at the playground
(another drug deal gone wrong)

-Were you smelling your flowers?-

or when the machetes flashed and
loped off the hands of the tribal others

-Were you admiring one of your sunsets?-

I know you have never ever visited
the Balkans where men were lined up
and forced to watch their mothers,
wives and daughters being gang *****

-Maybe you had a cold then.-

and I never caught a glimpse of you
in Viet Nam where the ****** fell
like your gentle rain on the innocents
and my partner was cut in half
by a burst from a 40 caliber machine gun

-Were you cutting a ribbon at a new cathedral?-

or later when I went mad and ended up
committed, in jail, alone, broken

-Temporary deafness?-

or when my brother was set up and busted
by a corrupt attorney general
and when my mother died a horrible
long slobbering death by Alzheimer's

-More busy days?-

so I guess I only really have one question:

exactly what good are you?

~mce

Oct 2015

Dreams of Sepia

Hello, is this Lonely Hearts? *SPECIAL* Jack Kerouac

Seeking: sad sofa fingers to caress me in the pine dark night spine of the city
I want you like a loud fishmonger in smoke filled rooms of silence
the train tracks of jealous stars hallucinating the whiskey sky in black & white mercy

P.S : Must love travel & alcoholism & hate punctuation

thanks for reading my Lonely hearts ads so far... I hope you're having a laugh, just as I am... thought I'd do a couple of writers now.. what THEIR lonely hearts ads would look like
btw ' Sad sofa' is stolen from Kerouac.... ;D....' The Lonesome Traveller'...

#fun #romance #dating #humor #kerouac #beatnik #lonelyhearts #moderntimes

Oct 2015

NV

msg delivered

01:52 am
have you ever asked yourself like why you so lonely?*

01:53 am
or empty?

that maybe you give too much of your essence to people and never leave any of you for yourself

01:55 am
i know i do

02:05 am
and like that's maybe why i get so attached to humans

because in them,
i find myself

02:07 am
i need to change, because things shouldn't be this way

02:10 am
but it's hard sometimes you know, when most days you don't leave the house because you feel unworthy of the space you take up

02:16 am
so you'd much rather disintegrate into soil because you've become all too familiar with people stepping over you and admiring the outcome of your beauty but never the roots of your pain

02:19 am
i spend so much effort watering people in order for them to grow and hardly get enough sun shine to feed my own soul

02:25 am*
because i don't know how to do anything else but care for everyone but myself

Sep 2015

SøułSurvivør

eclipse

---

black crows fly
flock to the moon
and pick its fields clean
i sit and watch the harvest
as if in a dream

its face is barely visible
its light torn from its eyes
i sit here a'weeping
as it sails the skies

o brave moon!
do not despair!
don't give them a thought!
they may pluck your lighted fields
but their work is all for naught!

later in the evening
i see you have not waned!
as for all the scavengers

not a one remains.

soulsurvivor
(C) 9/28/2015

The harvest moon was used
as the name suggests - to reap
the fields at night.

Sitting here in its light
I can see how it was so named
I can almost see every
pebble on the ground.

#moon #eclipse #crows #harvest

Sep 2015

Randolph Llewellyn Wilson

The Raven

Naive are the birds that fly , running from a scarecrow , Psychodelic ******* man , he's gunning for a hero , don't mind letting go , from my perch this evening , crashing into Heaven , ****** like St. Stephen ... Fly into print , ignite fuel , **** crow , will crow Babylonian capitulation .......

Sep 2015

ejrmaguire

connection

And we connect...
And we separate...
You come come back and I dissipate
Loving you is this ache...
This pretty little box with no hinges
I can't open it and I can't separate
This connection is killing me

E.J.M.

Sep 2015

Arcassin B

Wolfspirit & Arcassin B - "The Waking"

By Arcassin B & wolfspirit

AB: Attractiveness will not flourish,
Body to body in the dark,
When your alone and you feel like
Nothings ever got your back,
Against the wall might get a scratch,
That pierced your soul and also
Doesn't call back,
Or leaves a text when you get home,
What is my final react,
Of being let down again,
In the night ,
Blowing winds,
I was curious to know how long you've
Known me since then,
The Waking,
I'm howling at the moon,
Like can you not hear me breathing!?
There are no further temptations to
Uncover your whole meaning,
Catching weird people getting in our heads,
Crowds watching us,

WSQF: the sweetest imaginings and the blissful calm
that this union brings..are we not one?
has life made fantasy come undone....
i wonder which one is you, is me, is one....
touching you is touching me, touching together
we are truly free....exploring, spelunking, delving
realms of pain and pleasure,
am i the adventurer, you, my treasure?
shut out the din of the madding crowd
exploring this message, to sing it out loud
so , we are connected, light or dark
one love, two bodies, one fatal spark
wide awake are we, while dreaming possibility
and the art of the probable...impossible is not worthy
let reign on high, imagination
you found my soul, i found my station
let's sleep on it, linger on the dreaming
as long as what we feel keeps streaming
i'm not asleep
i'm living you,

AB: We'd feel homegrown instead,
The smartest teens today,
We wouldn't end up dead,
To feel the lifting force,
Exploring others bodies,
Without cold sweats and unnecessary hobbies,
You don't hear me,
I was walking in the darkness with an open
Wound,
I'm waking up,
I just imagined you.

Wolves in The Arc coming soon !

#love #poetry #life #wolves #wake #ark #collaboration