My love,
is a blackberry bramble
A control freak
Taking over everywhere
Knocking down fences
to follow the sun
to get to their destination.

Thorns with hooks and barbs
Which will slice you cut you
pierce you and not let go
if you get too close

But, along the way
Will deliver to you
the sweetest berries you'll ever know.

Dainty hours
spent with her petal soft smile
lush exchanges
how her mouth makes words warm
delicate  moments
when our eyes held each other
little desolate
when hands separated
and time disconnected us
as it blindly does
without so much as an apology

Uncle Sam sat down across from me and placed his satchel on the floor.
It was time to pay the piper; that is God’s immutable law.
I tapped my bony finger, impatient to begin.
“That will be fifty eight thousand, Sam, starting with Tonkin.”

From his satchel, that seemed bottomless, Sam produced the cash.
“Start counting!” I demanded, as I drooled over his stash.
He started pilling Franklins up on the table there between us.
Each “C” note meant one hundred dead Due to McNamara’s genius.

Fathers and sons had fallen; young men by the score.
Just think of the girls they never kissed; the children they never saw.
Uncle Sam doled out the bills until his thumbs were sore
When he finished I took out my Scythe and swept them on the floor.

I saw Sam’s look of horror at my eyeless, nose less face.
He had counted out a treasure that he knew he can't replace.
“It was a Pleasure doing business.” Oh, how I despised that man!
Still I was certain that we’d meet often,even after Vietnam.

It was something of a medical miracle;
First, an acid attack had destroyed one girls face.
Then another young woman died and
her parents donated her guise
so the first girl's could be replaced.

It was a delicate operation,
detaching the face of one dead.
It became  as pale as a Kabuki girls'
It looked like a death mask they said.

How strange then was the sensation
when the patient was UN-mummified
To see someone else in the mirror;
The face of a stranger through her eyes.

She was glad to once more appear human
though the donor was somewhat older  than she.
She would live out her days in the face of another-
but then, We are all wearing masks- aren't we?

The poet lives two lives.
One on the outside,
And one in their mind.

When you look in their eyes
You could see an abyss.

If you looked long enough
You could sink into it.

But most people don’t see it.

Take the time to read the words, though,
And you would know for sure.

The poet lives in two different worlds.