Peacetime
Peace and peacetime
means guarding barbed wire
and watching rivers drown.
We forget the triumph of death
in wars fought on the surfaces of newspapers
broadcasted
through laughing mouths
pierced with the privilege
of paradise
and freedom.
What is peace to a shadow man
who wears the color of the next
enemy’s foliage
dappled and waiting—
paralysis
of natural shapes.
We put blue on our bodies so memory
never fades, so the jewels we swallow
from the crowns of naked kings
keep their shapes in our stomachs
and don’t rip their way out,
shards, shattered
shaped by desert and mountains, blade pounded
and too much moon dust.
Burning in pits designed
to get rid of,
and save.
Time was never our friend
or close with peace.
Peace means nothing but pain for those
who write their checks with blood
pay rent with the teeth of
tank crushed souls.
We all wear treads on our backs,
oil gloves and tinted goggles
sometimes rose-issued
sometimes black out, blind.
We attend the peacetime cold
war we do not prosecute until
the eagle calls
untranslated lines, front
and center
mass is our method to occupy
our plans and our interests
National
not individual
(Charlie’s birthday was last week
(but we couldn’t go)
Sacrifice and greater causes
and missing matrimony, mile
stones
lined side by side
white ghosts solid
marble halls of broken promises
and twenty years of
the pull-out method
and families ripped
apart under gentle flutters
of freedom whispers,
“Democracy” of salt water moats
before the castle gates
futile, feudal rights and
rites, funereal
but with no one left to cry
It’s quiet.
A peaceful, peacetime
silence.