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Lyn Senz Nov 2013
Pugsley snugs
on ugly rugs
and smugly shrugs
at Beak
But Beaky's peaking
and tweakily tweaking
while squeakily speaking
to Pink
And Pinky thinks
they're rinky *****
with stinky sinks
and ***** winks
Then Twiggy giggles
and jiggly wiggles
her wiggly jiggles
at Mister Higgles
And Mister Hig-g-l
Wait a second
Who's Mister Higgles?
'Undercover CBPP,' says he
(Crazy Bad Poem Police)
'Okay, let's break it up!
Enough of this stupid poem
Let's go, let's break it up!
Stay off bad poems people,
this stuff'll rot your
brain!"


©2011 Lyn
Nathan Millard Dec 2012
You were wrong about me…

You were
Wrong
About me

And I am glad I realize this now
Because you would never have been the one to admit it
And now I am done
You gave me nothing
Except snide remarks

You never had a good thing to say
        Never had a kind word leave your lips
  That is until it was greased with black velvet

Then and only then
They pour out, slurring and sloshing
Like the last drink before bed

Only your words don’t come with ice
Like your ***** have to

But some times
More often than not
No words are said at all

For more than a year at times
Nothing was said

No Happy birthday
No merry Christmas
And least of all
A Hello

So now that I have spent time without you
Out of earshot
I am starting to see how wrong you were
But I am also seeing you for who you are
You are no longer the reflection
Looking up at me in the broken glass
                              I had to swept up from the floor
You aren’t the spontaneous, Unreliable
Dad who goes out and buys a sailboat

No instead I see who you really are

Hurt, Scared, Defensive
Only you can’t raise a child  at arm’s length
I can relate to your child hood
After all I too know what its like to try and sift pearls of wisdom from the fountain of inebriated words pouring from a parents mouth
Maybe I just got better at it than you
It takes time and you generally just end up with handfuls of ash but every once in a while you see the shimmery white bead of wisdom standing out from its dark surroundings



I do not
In anyway
Condone what you did
Do
But there comes a point that I realized
Part of where our relationship being muddled messed up and painful falls to me
It is not my fault you did what you did
But it was mine that I expected any different
  A bad night
  Ending in tears
  Harsh words and slammed doors
  And profuse apologies the next morning
  The usual every other court mandated weekend
None of which my fault
But the four-hour car ride home
In which I usually decided to forgive you...
     That was
I should have never believed after the second or    
    third time that things would change
After the eighth or ninth
    Or when I lost count
I gave you second chance after second chance
Hoping one day that old ugly saying wouldn’t be true when I woke up the next morning

That saying being:
“I have three priorities
*****
Smokes
And my truck”

I guess I can’t fault you for being honest but when you said sorry and you looked so sincere is when I wanted your honesty to come through while in actuality that’s where it faltered

So it’s not worth me holding a grudge
Getting back and trying to get even

When you hold in all of that poison it hurt you more  
  than who you hold the grudge against

So
   You were wrong about me
I thought you should know and one day if you don’t yet, you will see that
One day I will look back and see how wrong you were but not resent you for it
It's when I realized this I started to forgive you
It may not be okay what happened
But I will be okay so I can’t waist myself on being angry, it only hurts me


So you know what dad

I forgive you
“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room.   Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”                              Marshall McLuhan

You understand where I'm coming from,
Reader Rabbit, you twisted ****? Maybe not;
While you and your boy/girlfriend, later your wife/husband,
Were ******* backpacks around Europe,
I was of a less fortunate, less frivolous cohort,
Like the poor, who always miss the fun stuff.
So I stayed home and waited, dreading time,
Treading water in Queens,
Doing the graveyard shift at the Wonder Bread Bakery in Jamaica,
(No, not that Jamaica, mun.)
Building bodies 12 ways, and sweating out the inevitable,
Praying to my lesser god not to hear from my local draft board.
And who was I to disturb the universe?
“It ain’t me, it ain't me, I ain't no senator's son;
It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no fortunate one, lawd naw.”
(Send  "Fortunate Son" Ringtone to your Cell)  
I was just another cynical working-class hero,
Unlike you, numb nuts, and the rest of your silver surfer friends.
I knew I’d wind up without my teddy bear,
Convinced I’d end up sans security blanket,
With no ****-vacant musical chair,
To plop my sorry non-exempt, 1A **** cheeks
Down into when the music stopped,
When the music’s over, turn out the light--Jim Morrison,
Lizard King--turn out the light.
My horse, my horse . . . no wait . . . **** the horse . . .
My kingdom, my kingdom for a 2-S college deferment!
What kingdom?  
What was it Jesus said?
Not of this earth, anyway.
Colonial Indochina: rich man's war, poor man's fight;
It was such an efficient way to rid trash from poor neighborhoods.

Needless to say, I’ve been having a little trouble adjusting ever since,
Since I got back from that Kafkaesque Disneyland Jungle Cruise,
My personal Cold War thriller,
My Tecumseh Sherman “War is All Hell” war,
My war: 45 years ago next week.
These things take time:
So says the recorded message on the VA’s PTSD Hotline.
45 years ago I packed up my duffle,
Packed for what I thought was going to be my last time in uniform,
Grabbed my Army discharge papers, and
Limp-dicked out the side door of,
The Veterans Hospital in St. Albans, County of Queens.
I’d like to say I never looked back. But I’d be lying.

(cue PSA: VA Reaches Out to Veterans:
The Department of Veterans Affairs will begin,
Contacting nearly 570,000 recent combat veterans May 1,
To ensure they know about VA's medical services and other benefits.)

Today and every day is 11-11, Veterans Day—
What gets me now is that all my time since The Nam,
Is on average two lifetimes,
For all those sent home, bagged and tagged.
Is it survivor’s guilt? I doubt it.

You may not understand this, but I miss that freaky jungle.
I felt safe there.
How quickly I learned to expect the unexpected,
And that meant to expect the worse,
Finding my comfort zone the more uncomfortable, the worse it got.
I miss the wet weight of the air,
The cloying heat and humidity.
Humidity: a plain and simple meteorological miracle,
When you have plenty of time to really think about it,
Which I did: 365 days and a wake-up.
You know that whole gorgeous hydrologic cycle thing?
I miss the rain, the sound of falling rain.
I miss the other sounds, every buzz and click,
All the arcane and dismal things that go screech in the night.
And that relentless insect hum,
The jungle vibrating and intense,
The colors vibrating too, especially that electric green,
A green so vivid, every leaf and vine,
"The world's richest repository of terrestrial biodiversity,” I read in some nature magazine,
Lying naked in bed while my therapist ****** me off the other day.
All those freaky creatures great and small,
Every miraculous living thing that’s really alive and thriving.
And this is why--I think,
Getting obnoxiously philosophical for the moment,
This explains why it got to be so easy to waste what was alive and thriving over there, including and especially our selves.

Death never seemed that permanent, that final over there.
And besides, you couldn’t **** anything for that long,
The critters all looking their wet and slimy same.  
Two minutes in The **** and you were
Killing every ******* gnat and bug,
Every leech and snake, anything &
Anyone that just looked at you sideways.

And the flora? Did I mention the flora?
Soupy Sales: (Smack! Bam!)  “I told you not to mention that.”
The flora:  the plants grew back and they grew back quick.
You chop a path on recon and the next day it’s not there anymore,
So you chop the whole way back to the L-Z.  
Chop, chop, Hop Sing!
You were one smart ****, Hop Sing,
Safe and sound in Lake Tahoe, Nevada-side,
Cooking up Ponderosa pork bellies for,
The Cartwright Clan: Ben, Adam, Hoss & Little Joe.
Meanwhile, I’m not earning any frequent flyer miles,
Aboard a chartered TWA, coffee-tea-or-me,
Royal **** airplane to Saigon,
A place called ** Chi Minh City today.
I remember looking around at the faces on that airplane,
As we landed at Tan Son Nhut,
Those forlorn godforsaken faces,
Black and Chicano and poor white trash boys.
Scared shitless, of course,
But we really were jolly green giants over there,
American conquistadors, Cortez and the Boys,
Seeking gold and glory and, of course,
*******, (www.urbandictionary.com):
That sweet wet hole we all crave,
Can't go for too long without,
Center of our life's desire,
What gives women the upper hand in almost every situation,
Except when you pay in South Vietnamese piastres,
Your basic exchange rate $3.00 *******.

Yes, we were American conquistadors,
But traveling light this trip,
Our black-robed Jesuit fathers having missed the flight.
That’s right, for us no Ad majorem Dei gloriam this time,
Our mission so simple and so clear:
SEARCH & DESTROY.
But mostly, Destroy.

And pretty soon you worked your way up the evolutionary ladder,
From bugs, to fish, to frogs and snakes,
Small varmints and reptiles, birds and rodents;
And by the time you taxonomy out to the runway,
You’re pretty much whacking anything that moves,
Anything you feel like, pretty much any time,
All the time, sometimes just to pass the time,
Just to break up the ******* monotony of it all.
So making the anti-personnel leap got sort of easy:
They all looked the same, didn’t they?
They all wore the same pajamas,
And it was never conducive to grunt longevity,
To nitpick the civilians from the soldiers,
Never a good idea to waste time distinguishing friend from foe.

Good Morning, Vietnam:
We really were nerve-gassed-Adrian Cronauers over there,
G-2 Army oxymoronic intelligence stiffs,
Having a little difficulty finding the enemy,
Having one hell of a time finding a Vietnamese man named "Charlie."
They're all named Nguyen, or Tran, or Thanh or Trong or Bao or Phuc . . .
Oh, ****, I get it now.
I grok the how and why,
Of all the names we’ve used for centuries to dehumanize the enemy:
***** and Nips, Chinks and Slopes,
Huns and Krauts, Redskins and Ivans,
Redcoats and Rebs, Zulus and Mau Maus, *****, Ragheads and Sand ******* . . .
To dehumanize is to be dehumanized.
Nominal dehumanization; linguistic trickery.
It made it easy . . .
Well, easier . . .
To **** you.

What was it Pope Innocent III’s legate advised?
“**** Them All.  Let God sort ‘em out.”

Is it smell of burning flesh that makes me so digress?

Yes, I miss that freaky jungle, my friend.
I miss knowing what to expect and what was to be expected.
And most of all I miss that absolute confidence,
My self-liberating soporific certainty,
That I did not give a **** whether I lived or died,
And no one else did either.
I miss the peaceful place to go,
Coping with fear by letting go,
By writing off my life,
My future "in-country,"
My 12-month tour of duty,
My 365 T.S. Eliot Ash Wednesdays,
Learning to care and not to care,
Cultivating indifference as to,
Whether or not I ever made it Wee, Wee, Wee,
All the way home again.
The answers were right there,
Always there, all the time,
In nursery rhymes, and counting songs,
In psalms and arias, and every blues and rock lyric,
Right there, so right ******* there,
In Kris Kristofferson/Janice Joplin parlance of the times:
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

And life for me since then--
ONE BIG, FAT-TITTED INCOMPREHENSIBILITY!

What was that Walter Sobjak in The Big Lebowski said?

“This is not 'Nam.
This is bowling.
There are rules.”
James Taylor Nov 2017
They came without vision
None questioned their skills
They took a big lead
Then promply got killed
New England was battered
New England was bruised
Atlanta was lunching
And quickly got schooled
The halftime explicits
They blistered the walls
The bigger the lead
The harder they fall
Tom Brady's the gravy
In Belichick's cup
Coach built a big fire
And heated him up
There were some deep passes
Some ***** and some dunks
The hell of it is
It was done without Gronk
That tightend of legend
Who sat in the wings
While wiley Tom Brady
Conducted the thing
It's all big in Texas
Including that game
The hype, the excitement
For Atlanta, the shame
We heard them complaining
We saw them give in
With Julio to lead them
They still couldn't win
But, there is good news
If it wasn't from chocking
They stumble this fall
Then it must be bad coaching
In twenty-eighteen, we'll fire the staff
And bring in some retread
For minimum cash
He'll get the ball rolling
We'll win it, for sure
Or, ole Mr Ryan
We're showing the door
Dada Olowo Eyo Nov 2013
On the day the sun blinks,
I lift up my supplications,
Grateful, in many situations,
Wacthing, hopeful, as the sun *****.
First 1,000 days in Abuja.
the strangeness that is realized when the words,
scattered and smattered, hardly useful enough to
com-paste/post a poem together, scrabbled letters
on a dining room table, ripe with possibilities,
ripe with the stink of inutility, for the
industrial-military complex of
mind-eye-tongue refuse to work together,
the letters, yes, scattered and smattered,
come on a regularly irregularly schedule,
not put together...

why should I write of this?
write of this of now?

my man-ifesto of inspirations loved and lost,
poems that arrive while I drive unable to record them,
for days now, a poem lay inert in my brain but just on the tip of
my rounded, tongue, the title knew me, knew it was mine to write,
but the man/poem coming together in mystical simultaneousness,
was nope, not conceivable,  
thus be advised somewhere in my body decaying
lies a decaying poem.

the title is
The *****, Dimples and Dents Upon My Body.

Perhaps this is that poem; but I suspect not.

This one was written in five minutes in one sitting, a run-on,
run-though
out of control.


so easy to write when out of control!
Randall Smith Mar 2018
The doctor gave me some pills,
Said these will help you sleep.
My eyes are getting heavy,
I think they are going to work.

My room is dark and quiet
I will finally get some peace.
The soothing sounds of music
Thunder and lighting fill the air.

The lighting of tracers,
The sound of dying men.
The thunder of the rockets,
I'm going back again.

Now I'm safe, I found a hole.
You guys are dead,
How did you get in here?
What do you mean, we're going for a walk?

I hate this time of year in the Delta,
There's red dust everywhere.
Wait, I think it's going to rain,
The red dust turns to red mud.

Frank, where are you going?
You've got the point again?
Step lightly brother, stay alert,
The ***** are all around.

Hey, Lt. let's take a break.
This radio weights a ton and hurts.
Yes Sir, I know, everyone has problems.
Yes, I'll be sure and tell the chaplin.

From the front, a M-16 on rock and roll.
I think Frank has found a problem.
Yes Sir, the radio is ready,
I think we are going to need some help.

Everyone spread out, find cover.
But watch out for traps where you go.
Radio guy, get over here, now>
**** I don't want to move.

He called the birds, help is on the way.
I see the tracers, going out and coming in.
Is it my imagination, is my radio the target?
My 16 is so hot, I grab one from the ground.

The captain calls our position,
Everyone drops and hugs the ground.
We can hear the jets coming
And hell is what they bring.

Something is not right,
I'm choking on the dust.
We are walking down a road
Me and the dead looking for a enemy.

I've learned to live with the
Loud ringing in my head.
But now it is drowning out the
Sounds of the bullets and guns.

The heat and fear, I'm soaking wet.
The sounds and smells cover me.
The mud is pulling me under.
My wife is shaking me awake.

The smell of ****** and burning bodies,
Gun power, burn pits, rice paddies, bugs.
You can leave the war behind,
But it follows you home.
You can escape for a while but never forever.

— The End —