Addonizio - Lucifer at the Starlite: poems

Ries, 29, Clark, WA.: killed! Army Spc. Quoc Binh Tran, 26, Mission Viejo, CA: killed, Army Spc. Bryan L. Freeman, 31, Lumberton, NJsame deal! Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Larn, 22, NY, you guessed it! O I could go on and on, for as long as I live! In Africa, too, theyve been starved and macheted! The morning paper said the Serbs apologized for Srebrenica, 7,800 Muslims murdered in 1995, I know its old news, but hey, theyre still dead! I almost forgot my neighbors niece, 16 and puking in Kaiser Emergency, the cause a big mystery until the autopsytoxic shock syndrome, of all thingsI thought that was history, too, but I guess girls are still dying; who knew! I run for two miles, my knees hurt, and my shins, I step off and stretch for a bit, I go back outside into the rain, it feels chilly and good, it goes on all day, unending and glorious, falling and filling the roof gutters, flooding the low-lying roads.

Green Bee, Russian Quaalude, Redheaded Slut: IEDs on the supply route to pleasure. Theres a gala in your hypothalamus, helium balloons rising to the rafters, the fizzy ricochet of laughter. Theres a stumblebum in your cerebellum. That empty feeling crawling toward you should you kill it with a wadded paper towel or trap it in a jar and shake it out and send it flying into the grass? Is your head full of frozen tamales and a vodka bottle curled on its side? How do you get through the interminable evenings? Are they really interminable? Have you considered the alternative? Now get out of your car, stand by the side of the road and take a step. Now recite The Waste Land, backwards, beginning with that sexy Sanskrit word.

I remove my jewelry and set it on the nightstand, I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair. I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine. I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air. I do it for love. For love, I disappear.

But there was something in the air of you, O hour, if only because you were fugitive, barely there even then, glimpsed and soon gone. Now I think I see you, gleam of a Diet Mountain Dew can crushed in the weeds. Cellophane. Pop-top. Glass shard shaped like lightning.