America, loud, clear, obvious, imperial perfidy all embracing, but local Quakers oppose, college kids’ resistance, pre-My Lai inundated. Saturated, drowned in futility, onlookers
at the far edge of war, a genocidal spectacle. Vietnam, marker and scourge, a wound before we knew much of art or thoughtfulness, puzzled, concussed, chewed up. Bodies, cities burning fell out of tvs, in black and white, NBC, CBS, ABC. First mass incineration of another culture for our generation, introverted, autistic, active, angry, furious; image-immiseration in the holocaust of b52's soaring over that Asia America punished. Age of conscious impotence, advanced corruption post JFK Umrica satrapy, pentagon techno-ghouls, tiger cage consciousness. By necessity taught to shrug it all off, the dominant savage imperial real roaring up to this very present. And he, known from grade school, uber-masculinized, marine corps, ground troops, he many small but comprehensive slaughters witnessed. Soft sad lonely boy came back ram rod sharp, abrupt, angry, fragged somehow somewhere. After a few years at pulp mill, took shot gun, blew his life away. Sad terribly lonely hunter boy who dreamed of trapping and fishing only, in a far
distant cabin off the Sheep Lake road to the mountain called Old Glory.