There is no need to dwell on the exterior cliche of an injured soldier, the propaganda is superficial. Civilians have only plastic green men, heavy dusty movie set costumes, and Army-of-One heroes to populate stereotypes. Keep your images larger than life, no use touching up a paint-by-number. Mine was banal, foolish, and 19; enough said.

One fence is the fraternity itself, the next is brain injury. No other way to understand but be there. A Solid-American-Made-Dashboard cracked my forehead at 45mph.
Crumpling into the footwell,
unaware that the flatbed's rear bumper
was smashing thru the passenger windshield above me
the frame stopped just shy of decapitating my luckily unoccupied seat.
Our vehicle's monstrous hood had attempted to murderously bury us under,
but the axle stopped momentum's fate and ended the carnage under dark iron.
Shards of my identity joined the slow, pulverized, airborn chaos.
Back, Deep, Gone.

Unconsciousness is the brain's frantic attempt to re-wire neurons, jury rig broken connections, the doctor's desperate attempt to re-attach, stand back and say, good enough. Essential systems limply functioned, but unessential ones were ditched. Years later a military doctor diagnosed an eventual triage: Hypothalimus disconnected from the Pituitary Gland, Executive Function damaged, long pathways for emotional regulation interrupted.

I woke up still kinda bleeding, crusty blood in my hair, a line of frankenstein stitches wandering across my forehead.   My sense of self had literally dissolved into morning dust floating in a sterile hospital sunbeam.  My name was down the hall, words and the desire to speak were on a different floor.  Life became me and also a separate me under constant renovation, a wrecking ball on one half, scaffolding and raw 2x4's the other.

Waking up in the hospital, I realized I needed help to get the blood cleaned up.   A nurse came in, largely glared at me in disregard, and quickly left… for an hour.   She returned and brusquely dropped a useless ace comb and gauze on the blanket over my feet and abandoned me again.  This was my introduction to the shame of a VA hospital.  I minced my way to the bathroom, objectively examined my face in the mirror with shocking stitches above one swollen eye.  Gingerly rinsing my hair, the water ran pink in white porcelain.  I remembered the sound in my skull between my ears when a doctor scraped a metal tool across my skull, cleaning debris before stitching.  I recalled that in the ER I was asking Is he ok, repeating it like a broken record, knowing I should stop but I couldn’t.  There was also perhaps a joke about an Excedrin headache.

It was morning, and since there was no such thing as time or purpose or feelings anymore, I wandered to the hall with my only companion, the IV pole. One side was a wall of windows, and I was, what, 10 or 12 stories up from the streets of a much larger city than where I crashed.  The hall was warm and sunny.  I wheeled my companion to a blocky square vinyl chair to sit next to a pay phone.  I didn’t have any thoughts at all, or care about it.   After about an hour my first name floated up from the void, then with some effort my last name.  It took the rest of the morning to remember I had a brother.  After lunch we resumed our post, and I spent the afternoon in concentration piecing together his phone number.  God had pushed the reset button.

Thirty years ago the doctors didn't understand head injuries; they only recognized the physical symptoms. At first there was good reason to be permanently admitted to the hospital.  My blood pressure was unstable, sometimes so low that drawing blood for tests caused my veins to collapse even with baby needles.  My thyroid had shut down completely, only jump-started again with six months of Synthroid.  I had to learn to live with crashing blood sugar and fluctuating appetite.  For years afterwards, any stress would cause arrhythmias, my heart filling and skipping out of sync, blood pressure popping my skull.  Will the clock stop this time?  

There is always at least one momentous event in every person’s life that becomes punctuation, before and after.  The other side of Before the accident truly was a different me.  I have a vague recollection of who that person may have been, and occasionally get reminders.   Before, I was getting recruiting letters from Ivy League colleges and MIT, a high school senior at sixteen.  After, I couldn’t balance a checkbook or even care about a savings account in the first place.  Before, I had aced the military entrance exam only missing one question, even including the speed math section.  They told me I could chose any rating I wanted, so I chose Air Traffic Control.  Twenty years later, I thumbed through old high school yearbooks at a reunion.   I saw a picture of me in the Shakespeare Club, not recalling what that could have been about.   On finding a picture of me in the Ski Club I thought, Wow, I guess I know how to ski.   A yellowed small-town newspaper article noted I was one of two National Merit Scholars; and in another there’s a mention of a part in the High School Musical.  

This side of After, I kept mixing right with left, was dyslexic with numbers, and occasionally stuttered with word soup.  Focus became separated from willpower, concentration was like herding cats.  The world had become intense.

(chapter 1 continues in memoir)

Take one step forward
And two steps back.
Be sure you are following
The corporate track.
Pay out your earnings
Never give a ****
Now you are doing
The Uncle Sam Scam.

Bend right over and
Touch your own toes.
The politicians mostly can’t
And that’s how it goes.
They get their money
And big raises too.
Just like the CEOs
But none for you.

Take one step forward
And two steps back.
Be sure you are following
The corporate track.
Pay out your earnings
Never give a ****
Now you are doing
The Uncle Sam Scam.

Social Security funds
Came in mighty handy
When Georgie wanted war
And it was a dandy.
It made money for
His favorite buddies
And made our country’s rep
Murderously muddy.

Take one step forward
And two steps back.
Be sure you are following
The corporate track.
Pay out your earnings
Never give a ****
Now you are doing
The Uncle Sam Scam.

If you think more of CEOs
And big money corporations
Than you do of the people
Suffering in our nation
And you keep voting for jerks
And overrated hams
You are becoming champions
Of the Uncle Sam Scam.

I saw him; I saw an Israeli committing ****,
In the Gaza strip the former land of Arabs,
The eye of Palestine, a beacon usurped away,
By the sons and daughters of God, the Hebrew Yahweh,
I saw there the sons of God committing ****** horror
Of all lethal horrors, they brutally ***** Arab women,
***** Arab girls and lame women, grand mothers
And others in the brudah as their male loved ones,
In askance standing to look, their face tearfully a gape,
Sons of God from the house of Israel **** brutally,
They wound, mayhem, do every thing murderously,
Other than mass ****** in rounds, a lesser punishment
Perhaps; they mete as a show of forgiveness, show of ruth,
Sons of God have an evil nemesis; they siege humanity like a devil,
They unashamedly **** young children, sexually and homosexually
Lesbians from Israel, the house God also brutally **** and ****,
They **** forlorn Arabs and Africans, for no other reason,
But the race, faith, ethnicity and weapons of their victims
Are no match to the evil and satanic ploys of house of God; Israel,
Israel Please, stop ****, stop; ****** and civil casualties,
Against the desperate and the armless, they are forlorn,
Israel listen, your Gaza Culture is crime against humanity,
You maliciously habour weapons of mass de-creation; Nuclear,
You have fierce most segregation camps, to detain African
Refuges, o! No you call them black illegal immigrants,
And in those camps you brutalize them more than the visitors
And the   inmates of Guantanamo prison, you really torture,
And you leave them to die of hunger in the open field,
As your head boy Benjamin Netanyahu gives an OK.
Israeli you are liars; you are not the sons of God,
All humanity reflect divinity, But Israel reflect terror,
Israel you are liars, god never gave you Palestine,
Those are your fables that fuel racism and terrorism,
It the weapons you get from America that gives you
Palestine your evil acquisition, an eyesore to the just,
Israel you played a decoy and bombed the twin towers,
In New York on the 11th date of September,
To stunt the American bulls to goof in their folly
To attack Iraq of Sadam with drones and scuds and
Patriotics, as you stand aside in self-congratulation,
Israel you are bad, your heart is anti-human and satanic.
Who made other nations to be gentiles?
Other than your malicious conscience,
That breeds hatred inherent in you
For those who confess different faiths?
And subscribe to different nationalism,
O Israel! The dweller of Jerusalem
If God created you alone, then who
Created Negroes the dweller of Congo forest,
O Israel the forced dwellers of Jerusalem
Why is it difficult for you to stay, mix and intermarry?
With Asians, beggars, gravediggers, Muslims, Africans,
To intermarry with humanity, how fragile and
Self suscipicious is your testicles and vaginas,
So that you uppishly shun humanity, by denying the poor
Their natural right of ***; *** that only  prevents war.

What be more grandiose than poetry,

     expound at your own discretion,

   bottle sunshine, save it in a jar,

    tie an affectionate knot, spread it around

     flood desert mirages with flowing spirits,

speaks kindly and murderously about love,

  can tempt winds to uncoil temptation's gist

****** upon or written asunder desperation

    relentless in its seizing of human behavior,

magnifying moonbeams or star's decimation

    perfumed magnolias to winter's cruelty,

  call of the wild midst sweetness of fresh rhubarb pie,

infinitely vast in its incalculable grasp of predication,

  beyond limitless infrastructures 'neath fancied significance

Mid autumn’s eve
Dancing dust and flickering campfire alive

The slumbering women
With narrow waists
Fan the white-hot humidity
Rising in our *****

We are torn by a peculiar ***** pain
And an Ancient Whisper tells us to take them

But a Hollow Echo retorts our hammering heart
To be patient in our sleepless heat
As a watcher in the woods
Until the women’s voices
Are darkly wet with desire—
               But we cannot wait . . .

An impish grin then pulls our lips
When the sinister silence
Drapes over the desirable women

We span their length with our imagination
Full bosomed and tawny skin—
Musk and wildflowers lavishly call us
And we, carefree with the flames
Take them with a Ruling Passion

Fast dance and star fire
Clawed and kicked fought and spit
Struggling dearly to save their thighs
Against the Velvet Night

Blood smell becomes the campfire
Dancing dust dies
And we return to our sleepless side
Our Eternal Hunger satiated for the moment

And the narrow waists
Lying spent and used were Murderously Furious—
               But we could not wait . . .

Eleanor Jun 29 - Eleanor Aug 20
Residential Eating Disorder hospital,
No outside love[rs],
Mere minutes in the garden with the tall, tall fence,
Reminding me of a book of fairies, read once,
And not 14 years, could create an easy life for her,
Words, water-like, floated awkwardly, speaking "Oh this disorder? It's not hurting.",
Heaven made you this way- I cannot believe in religion anymore, it sends my mind murderously bare,
Your hair thinning quite badly,
Your blood beats up and down,
Your bones, brittle,
And your smile drowning in a frown,
I'll wait for our reunion,
A kiss upon your mouth,
Tell me that you're certain.
Tell me that you'll still be around.

\

February a baleful month
dabbed with deep darkness,
the calendar's mortuary
nature's own Gulag.
Its window opens upon
possible impossibilities
none of which yield joy.
Crows plummet murderously
from the heavens
vainly trying to flee
into spring but merely splat.
Roads are crushed
beneath a carpet of ****.
Frosted blimps soar naked.
Boots refuse to stay tied.
Your parent's nightmares
freeze your sweaty sleep.
Snow falls like dead swans.
Eclairs crystallize into
lumps too solid to enjoy.
A month of undeserved
solitary confinement
that trembles the soul.
A deep achromatic terror
keening coldness
in a huge white wail
penetrating the ears
until march stops
the madness and hope
blossoms as crocuses,
apricity achieved,
small phosphorescent
dots of desire.

  ~mce

The buttery eye of a butterfly caught my sigh slipping shy to the windowsill where your lips spill insomnia powering watermills undefeated by the modern Don Quixotes. My muse breathes in higher frequency... I'm telling her to stop... Stop. My thoughts don't rely on my lungs anymore for they have organs of their own... as well as separate agendas. They paint you psychedelicate, frail and yet invincible. Murderously vulnerable. Violently tender. The hunted is the hunter. The femme fatale.

Seldom have I seen such strength, such purposefulness shown
And I have witnessed many who have made their message known,
Immovable this woman stands in seas of raging tide
Where friend and foe, as challengers, she’s deftly swept aside.
Resolute she stands atop white cliffs of blazing chalk
To glare across the Channel where her predecessors stalked

In league with Winston Churchill with pugnacious jawline set
When he thrashed the fiend in Jackboots and field grey appuletes.
In league with Margaret Thatcher with that glint of grey in eyes
To the accolades of Gorbachev who recognised the prize.
In league with Boadecia the ghost of power past
Who rallied this great nation to fight on to the last.

Snapping at her ankles the dogs of turmoil writhe
And comrades of another time amass to criticise,
Labourites howl murderously to all who would take heed
While the rabble rousing Europeans joust to intercede.
Swirling round her skirts they mass now screaming their abuse
At her articulated message of a pathway less obtuse.

If Tony Blair had the ***** it’s to her side he’d dance
As would Jeremy Corbett but of that there’s little chance,
Her Majesty stands forthright, as do all her heirs
Including Will and Harry who are cheering from the stairs.
Dianna’s there in spirit plus the Kiwis from the pub
And the rough crowd from the chippie all dolled up with a scrub.
She needs ALL of you behind her in her struggle for the best,
Independence for Great Britain is ascendancy’s great quest.

The very heart of what It means to dwell within these shores
The very heart of what it means to be Brittish to the core.
England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales combining for the task
Of a guarantee of future from the quagmire of the past.
We SHALL stand behind Teresa May and make our voices heard
As we scream aloud the anthem to impart our final word….

RULE BRITANNIA,
BRITTANIA RULE THE WAVES
BRITAIN NEVER, NEVER EVER…
SHALL BE SLAVES!
Boom, boom, boom
RULE BRITANNIA,
BRITANNIA RULE THE WAVES
BRITAIN NEVER, NEVER EVER….
SHALL BE SLAVES!

M.
18 December 2018

I am merely a poet

a writer

an igniter of fire

the designer of a prior desire to admire the harmonious choir

but quick to tire of contriving liars

as the potential buyers hold strangulation wires

about to lay me in a pile of blood soaked fliers until my life expires

and all this illusionary harmony is alarming me

stalling me in its comedy

they think they're disarming me with talks of peace and prosperity

as i hilariously smash their conspiracy theories

as i am seriously furious when i deliriously remove the sanctity from your sanctuaries

sketching lucid rhymes in obituaries as corrupted school kids watch me curiously

i see your timid hands when you approach me nervously

as i hiss cyphers murderously

while you atrociously fumble satisfactory rhymes

i miraculously summon these mumbling mimes

ducking before the holy and unholy shrines

no god but father time

laying low tumbling dimes

still ducking swine from misdemeanor crimes

making local news and the seattle times

as they run and hide with their nines

im packing verbal calibers of all kinds and splitting minds with my lines

enshrined