You haunted us as you were haunted
Spectres spreading from your head
To your heart
To your hands
To the souls of your daughters and son.
You were haunted
Hunted
Hounded by demons of your own creation
Reality slipping,  spiraling slowly
Out and away
Grasping at lucidity
Groping for clarity
Desperate for breath in the growing vacuum
Of your world.

We spread your ashes at Brandy Creek
Three generations went into the woods
And two came back.
We took you to the waterfall
Poured you like milk
Spreading cloudy white into the earth
We took you to the dogwood
On the creek bed
In the shelter of a wise and fallen oak
Covered you like a sleeping baby with leaves
We took you to the stump by the rock
Overlooking the creek
Spread you like wishes in its gut
And prayed for new life from your remains.
We exorcised you in Whiskeytown
Spread your head and heart and hands
And broke you free of the bounty on your soul.

creak and crash
a hundred yards from my bunk
dumb metal falls
following its unsupervised trajectory

i have a helmet i do not wear
they always fall while i'm sleeping
INCOMING
INCOMING
INCOMING
taking the place of being
gently woken by my dog's cold nose
on my neck

this place is silence
roaring silence
helicopter blades chopping through
the whine of incoming mortars
silence deafening over the
shuffle of boots kicking gravel
barely holding together the grit
that covers the ground
the grit
that covers the toyota hiluxes
the radios the windows the lights
the beds
the grit that fills our mouths
as we whisper in the dark
rustling silence as we whisper
dark secrets
movements and code names and equipment and
just how long were those explosives buried
this place is blood
a decade's worth of
my brother's blood pouring
through the wadis in the desert in the dark
ten years of my brother's blood
dripping from our fingers
every death a stain on our fingertips
as if we pulled the trigger ourselves
a millennium of blood
dried on these mountains
the geography screaming secrets of its past
begging us to go

when I’m gone tie a yellow ribbon round your heart
weave it tenderly as your fingers through my hair
wrap it round round round tightly keep me close
keep me in your skin keep me in your bones

my dream
is for my little fingers
to make little words
that softly say
the biggest loudest ugliest things
and for little hearts
and little minds
to maybe lend a little ear
and maybe grow a little

why is
the way your hands wrap around my name
the gentlest whisper
why is
the way my hand towel smells like your cologne
the cruelest heaven
why is
your absence, your space
the air where your chest should be

as i sat cross legged in my dorm room,
the dawn lazily waking,
hugging my solid metal wastebasket
emptying the contents of my bad decisions
into its yawning mouth
lurching forward with each violent reminder
of every feeble drowning
of every bitter memory
i realized

only squares have trashcans with holes in them.