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.