Poetry
Hell-Hound-Warfare
An Iraq-Afghanistan special report
Knife hands hell-hound my throat, my bloodshot
eye stays
open,
my face painted
desert, two wet trails go
from gray youth to
pink-cheeks-manhood,
singed brows and lashes send
smoke signals to circling ‘copters, hands
covered in blood, one of us
is dead.
Ears droop to
my bent-knee-side, forlornly killed
again, I watch the slow-
moving nexus of pythons-time wrench
and wrap, tighter, with every
sinew-corded-turn,
night-vision-light splits the moment
between John being
alive and John being dead,
time falls through
a hole, his parents fall through a hole, his wife
falls through a hole, his children fall through a
hole in
the road where
the bomb exploded and carved out blacktop like
a scoop of ice cream,