Ode to a Wishing WellIn the presence of God we recycle rests and resets and strategic reserves. I have distances–– trenches I kept away from myself. I have worn the shadow on my face—the smudging eye black my horse-bridal bit and mouth piece. Tastes of dried saliva and freedom brush your cheek. When I kiss you leave a coin in my mouth. Token and totem, I cheek the entire deployment. Chipmunk choking on dimes at taps checks out every morning. Each today tastes like burnt maybes, like shisha might smell–– burnt, maybe. Today, I sweat some copper, taste blood, spit blood refuses to heal. The same way Sargent Heaton’s spilt femoral will forever Be the one artery I can’t seal. can’t locate it, clamp it, pressure a kink in his hearts hose. I tear open one last chance in a pouch. Dump powdered flesh fire, a caustic fairy dust called quickclot into an arterial rupture. Artery’s structures can fail catastrophically can becoming a blood sprinkler. Incarnadine spigot we were led we believed was not just us being bled in the desert, deservedly. Rarely seen abandoning mu post to overhear Psyops NCOs laughing while tying blindfolds over Sunni girls’ Disabuse the mujahedeen of his Abusive conventional portrayal of Geneva. I choke on MREs. Pound-cake provisions civilian contractors and our NCOIC of requisitions all beholden to a Pangaea One World Bakery production. I am unleavened and pursued by a million-man march of flies. Flitting points of my compasses point out to me: desert robin hood is played by the desert fox. Needle points due north, then true north, then at a deserted friar tuck. The night sky, a backlit hand Puppet. a star-dogged moon silhouetting your hand, running over me and absorbing my surfaces. Copper blood and disembodied pennies wells in Damascus where young Muslim men serve what is clean and acquirable–– recovered coins. Buy lebin and hobez. taste of ferrous as and copper. Upon there retrieval—the slushing up from cisterns in buckets this blood I drain from cheek a prayer, a contract, a de-insertion.
|
