he howled about the best minds of his generation  
being lost, but I am not sure they were ever found  
though I once lapped up his words like a cat with the sweet cream  
or a ravenous dog licking the bottom of his bowl
after a cold wet fast--yep, a dog, like that
and who ever called us the dogs of war?
canines don’t know **** about war: the waiting,
the planning, the measuring, the murdering  
they only know fear and what it tastes like to win
what it sounds like to lose, but they didn’t choose  
they didn’t have a moral dilemma when fur and teeth and flesh
became a hot blur a la ****** cur, we,
with our “best minds” he thought were festering
were duped  only by ourselves, by our desire to believe
the simple sweet lies rather than the shredding shedding truth  
who could we blame? Walter Cronkite? Norman Mailer?
John Wayne, Nixon or Peter Pan?
yes, he howled; his howling wasn’t that
of the wolf at the moon, revealing an eternal hunger for a full belly  
but a desperate audible gasp for one honest line, one
affluent aphorism before he slipped into the abyss
I won’t give it to him, because I was one of the dogs of war
not pretending to be wolf like he, not lamenting the loss
of great minds, whatever the **** those are  
I was washing the blood from my paws and snout
trying to forget it came from some mother’s son  
trying to silence the screaming of the other pups
when they fell prey to my razor sharp teeth  
given to me by the state, honed to perfection
not by a washing of my brain, but a heart that lusted for the ****  
long before I saluted my first flag, long before I swelled  
with drunken pride at the bugler’s song, or marched
in cadence with the deadly drums,
he howled, but I didn’t hear an imploring sound
when they lowered me into the godforsaken ground