Thoughts splattered across the page,
broken fragments scatter the paper
in one thousand causalities of war.
Yellowed teeth and dying poinsettias
become hope and hatred.
Everything awful becomes
beautiful,
and the poet wheezes
through a cloud of metaphors,
his sight distorted by the haze
of clauses.
He can no longer identify
what is real,
what is symbolism,
what is a painful memory,
what is so rhythmically pleasing that people
will repeat it in anthologies
20 years later.