I am not the one..who chambered the final round.
Not the Pathfinder, in the smoke who called the choppers
that lifted the dead and wounded off the ground.
I am not the Chaplain who holds the hand of a dying young man,
struggling hard with his belief.
Not the nurse with ****** hands,
eighteen hours with no relief.
I am not the young widow, now with two children ,
feeling left behind,
not the biker who stands guard in a patriotic flag line.
Not the Sargeant, who with respect, present the final flag,
not the Officer, with wet eyes, collecting the causality dog tags.......
           But I could be!

I feel unsafe
In a building with closed doors, you are always there
There's no need to run, hide
There's no place to go
You always find a way to seep through my skin, infect my thoughts

Too long have you chiseled at my soul
Brainwashed my mind
Siphoned my happiness out through my pores

Now that you're gone, things are better
But I feel as if you took something
Ah yes, you took the memories
Stripped them of me, destroyed them with your toxic waste
I can't retrieve them
Ever

I want to touch my fingertips
To the center of the brim of your cap
And run them along the edge
One hand in each direction
Until the stiff peak gives way to soft fabric.

I will gently slide my fingers
Under the edge of your cap
Until it lifts off your head
So that I can toss it behind you
To be forgotten about.

I will trace your jawline
While you say things
In that honeyed, gravely voice of yours
Only it's not quite gravel- not that harsh
More akin with rough sand.

Then you will smile
And your teeth will shine white against your tan skin
While your eyes crinkle and laugh
And I will fall, sinking into their pool
Of warm, caramel coffee.

You will find my hand with yours
And interlock your fingers with mine
Holding them both to your chest
Your hands are large, rough, and strong
You only hold my hand, but my body is paralyzed

I sit and contemplate
arguing with fate,
debating about how
I ended up in this place...

How I failed out of school
Worked to raise the stakes
How I triumphed, and learned
from so many mistakes.

I realize now,
God has a plan for me.
When I was down,
my Mom would say this to me.

The book of Jeremiah,
gets me higher than them drugs
What fuels this euphoria
is my mom showing me love.

And that's all I need
to get me by
But when I'm alone
I turn to getting high.

I'm living to support
habits of addiction
I guess my life
is a contradiction

Yet scattered thoughts,
race through my head
Reminding me to keep on
because I'm alive, not dead.

play me love's music
harmonise our hearts'  tempo
practice every day

I am both pilgrim and detective -
A kind of penitent Poirot -
Sifting through muddy reality
In search of a woman - THE woman.

She appears to me from time to time;
Glimpses abound in those around me.
A riddle unsolved, a question unasked;
In love with what I cannot see.

We may even have met already.
Something missed at the time may grow
And consume - a glance, a polite word;
Some hidden gem revealed by time.

Her nature, like her face, eludes me.
Is she some noirish Nemesis,
With omnipresent cigarette haze
And the knell of doom in her heel-clack?

Or the timid nerd of the high school,
Revealed as a radiant beauty
Sans horn-rims, ponytail and books
(On reflection, that's probably me).

Shall we be tragic starstruck lovers,
Cut off in the peak and prime of love
To become a cliché for journalists
And poets immune to irony?

Or perhaps she is all of these things
Arrayed in sublime splendour,
Shifting dreamlike through modes of being
Which illuminate each other.

Besides, I am surely mistaken.
It is a poet's weakness in me:
Reducing his imagined beloved
To convenient literary types.

Just as well: moulds are tedious
No-one worth knowing fits into one
(My apologies to moulded readers -
You are probably happier than I).

Yet, without knowledge, I know her
Even as I search tirelessly.
For I know everything about her
(Save only her identity).