A War For Jim Morrison & The Doors

for Spc. Joseph Dwyer

This sky hides smiles
Lying like thief
Holding back tears
Reserved for deceased reptiles
Like you
Jim Morrison

I hold folded umbrella
In mock defense
Yet very much
Dependent on
Its promise to protect

I bask in the foolishness of this thought
Instead of say
Reading the real
Bad-news newspaper:
"The headache gray"
As Michael Stipe would say
Wishing it all away
But
Knowing well the world is raining blood
In untold megatons

Palms supine
I feel for rain
Rain
A real rain
One that may or may not ever come
But wouldn’t matter either way
Anyway

And
Like the liar clouds
I lie my own lie
Pretending to shine
My own sunshine
Denying the untold toll
Of Burmese souls
Or those taken by tornadoes
Tomahawks
Or other weapons our heavens have shat upon humanity today
Now shit-splashed about in Reuters gray:

Humid newspapers
Wilting in sadness
In newsstand
Command
Attention of
No one

With our shame deeper than the National Debt
We
Thought to be
Agents of change
Stand
Striped
Naked in orange
Exfoliated
Crushed
In unending pain:
An Escheresque loop of deceit
A Möbius bug strip collecting more and more lies
An endless PSA
Played over and over in our collective American mind
Ad infinitum

I think about the limbless men my age
I saw in Vietnam:
Whole lives without limbs
Without lips
Whole lives missing parts to their bodies
Phantom limbs
Signing
Mouthing
A strange language any standing man could understand
Telling the legacy of war in ways words could never

I put away my pocket-size English/Vietnamese phrase book
Speechless
In tears
Not wanting ever to return
To that dark
Shame-filled fold of mind

Should I press my eyelids tight this night
I can imagine Iraq War vets
Someday
In Iraq
In tears
At the sight of limbless there
There in the cradle of civilization
Rocking the world to sleep with
More boring war stories
More promises of peace
More lullabies
More lies

I may be the only man carrying an umbrella today
I may be the only man thinking these thoughts

Then again
You
Too
Lizard King
Mister Mojo Rising
May care

Then

The thought stops here

And the rain never comes



Photo: Warren Zinn, Army Times