Vonnegut was easy to admire. He gave you the sense that he'd seen people die, that war was something he lived - like an oracle saying, "Hey, this is what war is, it ***** *****. So it goes," you know? Then there's trenches, and Hemmingway.


But what happens if more people actually split an atom?

I'm a writer. I have no idea.

I did watch a guy get beheaded today - on Youtube. Almost. 30 seconds in and I couldn't do it. I've never lived war, but I watched an English aid worker, at the mouth of death say, "My name is David Cawthorne Haines. Following a trend amongst our British prime ministers who can’t find the courage to say no to the Americans, it is we, the British public that, in the end, will pay the price for our Parliament’s selfish decisions.."

Then a faceless man starts to rip an aid worker's head off.

So it goes. Writers go to war. I never had to. But I watched from home, between a Friday and Monday, and do my best to warn my children about the end.

Mother Do You Think They'll Drop The Bomb?

For most my childhood, I was lucky enough to ask, "Mother do you think they CAN drop the bomb?"

If you know Floyd, as far as breaking my ***** goes, done. I finally get that, pops. ***** will always be broken. But the bomb? That's not too different than the ***** is it? There's always someone. The hippie's now, I feel, just hope a little less, and pray a **** ton more.

Shreds of newspaper and pages from magazines
zigzagged toward the earth, feathering from the
high apartments down to the obsidian street.

Someone signed the treaty.

A brass band played behind a closed door.
Women, women, women.
More women than I'd ever seen in one space
shuffled or danced passed, twirling beads,
blowing kisses.

I was still ***** from the trenches.

An old man patted my back. A wordless, knowing nod.
Knowledge he understood and seemed to express, with time,
I would too. But in that moment,
in cheery Paris, all I felt: parceled and sold.

My body had become a vessel. This is something
you hear people say, "The body is a vessel,"
but I learned it, knew it; it was real to me.
I saw landmines and bullets have their way.
Boys, eighteen or nineteen, covered in ****
and puke and bile. I knew what bile was,
really knew.

A waiter outside a restaurant rushed over to me,
handed me a glass of wine. He looked at me like
he wanted me to say something.

It's just a vessel. This wasn't defeatism. This was.
The first time I got shot that's when I really
knew. I took one in the shoulder, went out the back,
shattered my collar bone. Pieces of me were missing.

A little girl, mousy and brunette, much like my own
niece, wrapped her arms around my leg as I walked down
the street. Eased her off. Set her feet back on the ground.
She curled her thumb and forefinger together with both hands, a pantomime of a pair of glasses. I did the same.

She lived entirely in her body.
She's endlessly fascinated by how her fingers bent and straightened,
by how far and fast her legs could carry her, the uncompromising
world, a child's ownership of time.

I wasn't floating above my body. It wasn't a bird in a dream.

When I returned home I was always off to the side, suffering
each sensation and conversation obliquely. This wasn't negative.
In a way this was a freedom: I was not a body; I was shapeless,
shifting, liquid in the hands of perceived reality and aging moments.

The girl took my hand, led me down a series of alleys until we reached
the Seine. She pointed. Men lit fireworks on the dock. They ran a safe distance.

Lines of incarnadine light shot upwards. One stream, however, fired crooked, almost a forty-five degree angle. When the fireworks sounded, all but the stray erupted invisible to the viewers, tucked away within the grey clouds. The rogue, much to the crowd's delight, exploded and scattered just above the water. A collective Ahhh. A soft fizzle.

not many people know what it feels like to cut themselves open in slow motion and feel the blood drops change from raindrops to tidal waves before their very eyes,
that were coincidently dripping too.
similar to the way it felt when my feelings for you started to pour through and all i could do was try to hold them all back and stitch up the cracks before i'd lost too much and fallen too hard, landing in a puddle of red that could very well have been what was left of my broken heart.


↠mndi➣