Poems

The mama san sitting on the sidewalk in a lotus way
was selling Johnny Walker Red 10 meters south of the PX that day.

The scolding civilian in front of it was telling the apple-cheeked troop
he wasn’t in the loop to legally choose booze there
(less than a klick from Sin City’s main ‘ho’ stroll).
You know, old enough to die but not to get high and all that.

Just a few minutes away he’d find, try and buy
any thing or one for the right sum.

28 Mar 04

A Veterans Day Poem

By Horace Coleman

Red for the tears, blood and lives shed.
White for the light we sought or fled.
Blue for the dues we paid
and the clear sky we crave.

Live Meat/Dead Meat/Atrocity Picture
By Horace Coleman

What changes you from living meat
to a maggot’s entree is some steel and
high explosive or lead and black powder.

The difference between a guy with a trophy fish
and one posing smilingly as he holds up a torso
by the only leg left on the thing
is where the claymore hit it.

If you can fool you can rule. and...

By Horace Coleman

“ President’s got his war,

folks don’t know what it’s for.

Trying to make it real –

Compared to What?” – Eugene McDaniels

The willing suspension of reality’s tension

lets marriages, religions, pimping, businesses,

politics and other con games lurk and work --

as well as they do for you.

If you’re good at them you avoid the blame,

get to the presents and duck the presence

of the devil you voted for while fooling

some people some time, putting most behind the post

(most of the time), jiving all-all the time --

as they pick up “stuff’ with a pall from the mall.

If you believe “I can’t be played!”

You’ve stayed in the casino too long,

thinking “My face won’t get wet” and “I’ll win the bet!”--

despite the plumes of flumes from other’s minds and behinds.

Days change but people won’t. Don’t they

just do the same strong wrong different ways?

We’re long on might and short on insight.

Whether it’s the good being sad or the bad feeling glad,

there’s a cost to being or having a boss.

God, wearing many faces, crouches in strange places

watching us think we can all win the lottery and wear mink.

Gated lives are whirled and swirled by barely thought of maids

from third world hives who sanitize for our protection and predilection.

That labor shades some from unpleasant thoughts and smells.

And others’ druthers.

But who’ll snuggle us from the prolonged struggle with hells

full of sights, moans and yells unfiltered by Prozac,

caused by uneasy needs and crippled deeds?

The underpaid Praetorian Guards of our manicured but quake yards?

Or is it, in fact, just a panic--not a terrorist--attack?

19 Sep 02

A chain of sand, seeds and deeds

By Horace Coleman (about the Iraq War)

daily danger comes

you sleep quickly and expect

morning’s miracles

summer weapons kill

spring fears and those who plant them

all seasons have ghosts

flailing and drowning

even as you sink you think

chaos has purpose

in silky darkness

as it bleeds new words

your body remembers hers

young warriors ignore

others dune shaped scars until

acid waves flow onto them

Two 21-year-old California Corporals

before the Winter Solstice

By Horace Coleman (about the Iraq War)

In the same paper on the same day, 3^rd Battalion,

5^th Regiment, 1^st Division, 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force

One wanted to travel around Europe,

spend time truck customizing but

he deployed in September instead and was dead

before the Christmas trees were all sold.

The one in Fast Company got the Global Good

War on Terrorism Expeditionary Ambassador’s

Letter-of-Commendation.

One finished boot camp the week the Twin Towers tottered.

The other’s daddy heard through chattering long distance that

“Things are getting weird.” And,

“I’m having real bad dreams . . . .

Things are starting to affect me.”

Things like the “hostage slaughterhouses”

stocked with disemboweled women and children,

“their feet cut off,” their warm still bodies.

Daddy I said his son “could not

get the smell of death and blood

out of his clothes and out of his mind.”

Corporal II’s friend, who’d showed him

how to lower his Chevy and install a CD player,

was asked to look for a good deal on a motorcycle

to be bought after discharge. But Corporal II

was lowered and installed instead--

across the road from his folks’ original home.

Corporal I’s daddy was told his son

was moved into a shower stall after being hit

(“the cleanest and safest place in the huge firefight”)

as the insurgents fired while their bodies burned.

Corporal II’s missionary daddy said

“We were praying for his safety, but

God moved differently. We

trust God’s judgment, but we

don’t care much for His time schedule.”

Another higher power had a higher mission.

Daddy I got a box of souvenirs

the same day Corporal I (Mike) last called:

License plate from an Iraqi car

Russian binoculars

beat-up Iraqi flag

scope from a Russian rifle

head scarves, Iraqi men’s

scope from an Iraqi rifle

leather pistol holster with Arabic writing.

Mike was a car aficionado and they hunted.

“Best friends,” said Daddy I about his son.

The day before he shipped out, Ian’s family (Corporal II) --

Mother, Younger Brother, Older Sister picked up at LAX

and Daddy II -- drove down to Orange County.

They went to Dana Point Harbor,

ate at a Mexican restaurant in San Juan Capistrano,

saw the sun set over Laguna Nigel.

“It’s not that we did anything special,

but it was all special what we did.”

Other faded faces and families that week

were in Lafayette, Louisiana; Moore, Oklahoma;

Camp, Arkansas; Pasco, Florida; Ashford, Connecticut;

Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Rock Hill, South Carolina;

Ingleside, Texas; the Bronx, New York; Defiance, Ohio;

San Jose, California; Littleton, Colorado;

Campobello, South Carolina;

etc.,

etc.

Young people, old story.

Rummy wrapped and that was that.

God bless, Goddamn!!

19 Dec 04

(Data and quotes taken from obituaries published in The Los Angeles Times, 19 Dec 04; obituary of

Corporal I-Cpl. Michael D. Anderson Jr. – written by Amanda Covarrubias; obituary of

Corporal II-Cpl. Ian Stewart – written by George W. Briggs.)

Twin fates on a towering day

By Horace Coleman

Thoughts on September 11^th 2001 0n September 12^th

I fall asleep watching the late news:

The mews of a teenage girl with 10 pairs

of low riding jeans and the means to buy thong panties.

I wake to scenes seen around all the clocks:

fluttering, heavy human leaves,

stacks of unbalanced blocks

that used to be floors in buildings

toppling in unseasonable falls.

And, Pentagon puzzles being spilled.

I, you, we, see packs of struggling, fleeing, and

rescuing people powdered with dust, blood and screams

intercut with four (count ‘em, 4!) views of

planes plunging into the skyline.

Sure enough reality TV for survivors now.

A headline says: War has come home.

Whip that National Missile Defense on those suicides

swinging knives and box cutters and making sighs.

“I can’t believe it!” people keep saying. Meaning,

“My mind won’t accept it until the T-shirts come out.”

It’ll take a little while for easy and vacuous smiles

to reappear like spring flowers or frivolous weeds

and to build new towers of smugness.

Timothy McVeigh’s been out done.

Some foreign scum won the trashing championship.

But the stock market will open tomorrow

so we can get back to business as usual.

And we’re gonna get ‘em ‘cause

We’re #1 and too good to die!!

But you can’t win playing defense...

or, without knowing the real rules of

the game called Empire.

And Boy George,

with training wheels on his boots,

staggers toward more war.

13 Sept. ‘01

Forced March

By Michael Gillen

Slogging through mud,

tired and numb,

intent on reaching the battlefield in time,

the soldiers plod on.

Heads lowered in fatigue,

watching the worn heels

of the next soldier ahead,

they plod on, and on.

Many sleep as they march,

kept in line by an occasional bump,

through the long night,

on and on.

The silence of night

will soon give way,

to exhortations and screams,

cannon fire, and the clash of arms.

Through the night they march,

not long departed from camp,

and their mother’s wombs,

to reach the killing field in time.

1980

I Have Marched Before

By Michael Gillen

I have marched before,

Down some blood-stained road,

To the tune of a well-worn drum,

Or some other martial mode.

I know that I have been

On the battlefield before,

At another time and place,

In some long-forgotten war.

Perhaps it was a tribesman’s lance,

Or something else hurled,

That ended my life once before,

In this same embattled world.

1979

The Patrol Boat

By Michael Gillen

Dawn…

Leaning on the ship’s rail,

I watch the patrol boat

move off, leaving its trail

of dead fish as they float

by in the warm waters of the bay

(concussion grenades, dropped

all night, having kept VC swimmers away).

And in the sun later they’ll bloat,

as the sun rises on another day

in the War Zone.

After War: Some Haiku

By Michael Gillen

Flak

Flak bursts fill night sky,

a plane is hit, falls in flames:

shapeless mass on snow. .

Dawn Sight

Patrol boat moves off,

work done, grenades in water:

fish float by with tide

Phantoms

Phantoms scream above,

river people look up, then

back to washing clothes.

Flares

Three flares dead ahead,

burn holes in China Sea night,

guiding us to war.

Water Sound

Water pours off roof:

the sound of monsoon rain but

sun’s out, snow melts!

Da Nang

Nighttime rockets kill.

After dawn fishing boats come

back from the sea, still.

Tam Bao 69

Standing in Tam Bao,

monk enters, sits, buddha stares:

war is far away.

Tam Bao 93

In October rain,

Tam Bao’s doors locked shut, so

use memory gate.

Hue Bird

Blossoms at Tien Mu,

swallow released overhead:

peace prayer on way.

Thunder

Morning thunder -- rain?

Rude awakening instead:

sound of bombs falling.

Pylon

By Gerald McCarthy

And the young ones?

In the coffins - Hernandez

At night, invisible

aluminum boxes

slide down steel rollers

out of the belly of a plane.

Names from a new wall

count off a kind of cadence

marking time

no one hears.

Beneath the silver fuselage,

trucks wait to upload

their cargo.

Shadows edge the airstrip,

a greasy rain begins to fall.

The New War Dead

By Gerald McCarthy

A flock of starlings

scuttle on the rooftop

splashing in pools of rainwater.

The last leaves in the branches

of the red maple tree.

Look, my friend says

There’s a kind of dark all around us

you have to get used to it, s’all.

Bricker’s neighbor shot himself in his garage,

the summer I turned eleven.

He drove an old gray Plymouth,

a car with a single headlight like a beak.

Birdman of Church Street, we called him.

The car was pulled in when the shot went off.

A pistol, Tommy said. Smith & Wesson 38.

Once in winter I cut the yards,

saw him bent over his workbench--

the trouble light overhead, cigarette smoke.

He saw my shadow and looked up.

There’s this December rain that’s falling

and the news slips out, the dead

come back, a line of graying birds

huddled together in the rain.

For Nguyn (Marie)

By Robert “Tack” Trostle

Thinking of her tonight

alternately smiling

and broken hearted.

Remembering her face

like it was yesterday.

A twenty year old memory

that still bathes me.

Maybe tonight

I’ll feel her beside me

like many times before

but not hard enough to

make her reappear.

How could I let her go?

Maybe it was the war

that brought us together.

Both of us

doing what we had to do

to survive.

Was it love?

Or a relationship

of convenience?

A source of money?

A ticket to the States?

Temporary relief

from the lifers?

They say...

“Any port in the storm.”

I never got to say

Good-bye.

10^th Anniversary – “The Wall”

By Robert “Tack” Trostle

I feel like I’m doing it again.

Coming home.

Staring out the train window

into the darkness.

What’s out there?

Other passengers are looking

me over,

thinking,

“Proud veteran?

Hero?

Baby killer?

Drug addict?

Crazy Nam vet

about to go off?”

It’s 20 years ago

all over again!

How many times

must I relive it?

How many times

can I?

The Price

By Robert “Tack” Trostle

Some say the price was too high.

Some, who used the resources of others,

would have spent more.

The price is paid in lives,

and limbs,

and minds.

It can be paid in an instant

without negotiation.

Or in installments

over many years.

The price is the inability to say

“Marine” or “Vietnam”

for more than 15 years.

A payment can be made

every July 16^th

as you envision holding your best friend

dying in your arms.

There’s the “Holiday Plan”...

Tears in the shower

for no reason

every Memorial or Veteran’s Day.

For me

The “Delayed Payment Option.”

No payments for the

first 16 years.

The price includes titles,

taxes

and is subject to continuation

without notice.

WARNING!

This Product is Hazardous!

It should be discontinued!

It is needlessand none us

can afford it.

Vietnam Revisited

By Dayl S. Wise

Clinic in Ha Tan, Central Highlands, 1997

A man my age lies on a cot,

his brown back exposed to the wall.

Leg wounds a week old ooze.

A 30 year old mine went off, I’m told,

he was gathering wood.

I’m asked to take his picture.

He turns with narrowed eyes,

I aim,

focus,

hate fills the lens.

I close my eyes and shoot.

South Ferry to Manhattan

By Dayl S. Wise

The Lexington Ave. Express, car 9084

Sunday November 13, 1999, 11am

We gave him a wide berth,

This horizontal man,

smelling of piss,

stretched out on four seats.

His left hand

holds the neck of an

electric guitar,

red in color

with a yellow-white face,

parallel to his prone body.

Six strings anchored

from the bridge,

run up the fretted neck

wrapped around the turning screws.

A hooded head with

a round blank black face.

Lines of age, snow white beard,

resting, as if on a pillow,

eyes staring as grunts do

with their “thousand yard stare”.