What grows inside of these bones? The frail, frightened youth molts into a soldier running off to war. Paranoia gives in to purpose, fear into forged steel. He that once was lost at every turn, burns with a focus that consumes every hour. Running running running. faster further harder.
War is an angry siren, driving all that hear her screams to madness. My ears are on fire. Like a cat after its pray, my tongue thirsts for the blood of the oppressors.
I am a citizen of the great republic. I am a child of earth. I was wombed in the blood water mixture, brought into this world baptized in pain and suffering that I might lust for comfort only as the ancestor of slaves can.
Africa's dead haunt my waking hours. Children's bones beat like drums in my skull. To sit is to be silent. To wait is to be complicit. Iraq is my new home. War is my mother. I suck on the tit of chaos, nurse on the fattened breast of a mutilated corpse.
Every day the fire burns closer, and closer. I can smell the acrid stench of flesh. I shake against the monotony of my existence, knowing yet another orphan has died. Each death marks the passing of days.
Monday's bombs ripple crescendos in my Mogadishu blues. Tuesday brings wicked screams from Tutsi graves. Wednesday is the whirl of helicopter blades ghosting over the Western Sahara. Thursday the ghosts of Tikrit stand outside my window with bloody howls crying for help. Friday, Saturday, somedays every day is like an appointment in Samarra.
Death stalks my sleep.
The hyena dines with my dreams, his sickening laugh maddening as he thrusts spoonful upon spoonful of intestines into my soup. "STRENGTH! COURAGE!POWER! THE EYES OF YOUR ENEMY! EAT! EAT! EAT!"
I have tasted my fill of this madness. Still there is no escape.
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NOTES:
This piece continues to go under the knife. Each time I come back to it I find something that needs to be tweaked; another line that needs to be expanded upon, or a word that needs to be deleted. I am struggling to decipher the code of this poem, as there seems to be several pieces living inside of its skeleton.
I was tortured by the horror of doubt rising like a ferocious tide: I had lost all meaning and and sense of direction in every seeming aspect of my life. I was consumed by a desire to become something greater than the mundane that I had surrounded my genius with, yet at every door I was without a key. My art failed me. My words fell flat against my own ears. WHO WOULD LISTEN TO A WRITER THAT COULD NOT THINK? My talents haunted me simply to remind me of everything that I was NOT. I would rot in this vanity. Like narcissus consumed by his reflection in the pool, every day my image grew more tenacious with its maddening taunts. I WAS GOING NOWHERE.
