For Eli
Eli came back from Iraq
And tattooed a teddy bear onto the inside of his wrist
Above that a medic with an IV bag
Above that an angel
But Eli says the teddy bear won’t live
And I know I don’t know but I say, “I know”
‘Cause Eli’s only twenty-four and I’ve never seen eyes
Further away from childhood than his
Eyes old with a wisdom
He knows I’d rather not have
Eli’s mother traces a teddy bear onto the inside of my arm
And says, “not all casualties come home in body bags”
And I swear
I’d spend the rest of my life writing nothing
But the word “light” at the end of this tunnel
If I could find the fucking tunnel
I’d write nothing but white flags
Somebody pray for the soldiers
Somebody pray for what’s lost
Somebody pray for the mailbox
That holds the official letters
To the mothers,
Fathers,
Sisters
And little brothers
Of Micheal, 19…
Steven, 21…
John, 33
How ironic that their deaths sound like bible verses
The hearse is parked in the halls of the high school
Recruiting black, brown and poor
While anti-war activists
Outside walter reed army hospital scream
100, 000 slain
As an amputee on the third floor
Breathes forget-me-nots onto the window pain
But how can we forget what we never knew?
Our sky is so perfectly blue it’s repulsive
Somebody tell me where God lives
‘Cause if God is truth, God doesn’t live here
Our lies have seared the sun too hot to live by
There are ghosts of kids who are still alive
Touting M16s with trembling hands
While we dream ourselves stars on Survivor
Another missile sets fire to the face in the locket
Of a mother who’s son needed money for college
And she swears she can feel his photograph burn
How many wars will it take us to learn
That only the dead return?
The rest remain forever caught between worlds of
Shrapnel shatters body of three year old girl
to
Welcome to McDonalds can I take your order?
The mortar of sanity crumbling
Stumbling back home to a home that will never be home again
Eli doesn’t know if he can ever write a poem again
One third of the homeless men in this country are veterans
And we have the nerve to Support Our Troops
With pretty yellow ribbons
While giving nothing but dirty looks to their outstretched hands
Tell me what land of the free
Sets free its eighteen-year-old kids into greedy war zones
Hones them like missiles
Then returns their bones in the middle of the night
So no one can see
Each death swept beneath the carpet and hidden like dirt
Each life a promise we never kept
Jeff Lucey came back from Iraq
And hung himself in his parents basement with a garden hose
The night before he died he spent forty five minutes on his fathers lap
Rocking like a baby
Rocking like daddy, save me
And don’t think for a minute he too isn’t collateral damage
In the mansions of Washington they are watching them burn
And hoarding the water
No senators’ sons are being sent out to slaughter
No presidents’ daughters are licking ashes from their lips
Or dreaming up ropes to wrap around their necks
In case they ever make it home alive
Our eyes are closed,
America
There are souls in
The boots of the soldiers,
America
Fuck your yellow ribbon
You wanna support our troops?
Bring them home
And hold them tight when they get here
holy shit, andrea. wow, yet again, just wow.
Sleeping
When the flowers were stolen from my uncle’s grave
my grandmother drove to our house and collapsed at our door
strangled as an empty Christmas stocking
wailing for her piece of coal
I have never seen a person so finished with God
Her face was a massacre of grief Her cries
like shoveled granite chewed through her shrilling throat
All they left was the flag, she kept screaming
I thought her lungs would start bleeding
It scraped my chest clean
Hollowed me for weeks
Our house was the echo of a mother
clawing the floorboards for her dead son
a downed forest in her nail-beds.
At night I obsessed over how long flowers might survive in the hands of thieves
Spent a month scouring for answers in our basement
in the photographs of my father in Vietnam
He was as thin as a blade
his eyes unfiltered as the cancer they were given for free
Anyone could see, but the freckles in his eyes,
that war was no place for a soldier
The heart is no place for the talons of the kind of secrets
you can only keep in the same chamber you will keep loaded
to keep your hands from waking the ghosts of dead children
My uncle wasn’t killed by a bullet
he drank himself to sleep trying to drown out their tiny screams
My grandmother followed him to the grave like every mother does
I keep thinking of them today, as I sit in my parent’s living room
My father has been home from the hospital for a week
but I was just told he spent 3 years in a field of agent orange
but is refusing to accept his 10% veteran’s medical discount because
a true patriot knows cost of war and pays for it himself.
I have written this poem before
but always through a window
never through an open door.
I find my mother by the stove stirring spaghetti sauce from a jar.
I have never heard her breathing pull this hard.
Earlier, in the car, while my father broke down she turned up the
radio dial to save him the embarrassment of his whimper
The radio was playing “I Wanna Sex You Up”
We listened to it at full volume for three minutes
it was fucking hilarious
how none of us heard the word
I don’t hear the words anymore.
The president announces the end of a war
and I just stare at my mother’s eyes as my father’s face falls into
the trembling trench of his hands, like a boy fresh out of bootcamp
who has just dropped his gun into somebody’s cradle.
When a war ends, what does that look like exactly?
Do the cells and bodies stop detonating themselves?
Does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother?
When the sand in the desert is melted down and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at
does a white flag make for a perfect blindfold?
Yesterday I heard a story about a 6 year old girl in Iraq who can’t sleep because
when she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor’s corpse
If you told her the war was over do you think she’d sleep?
She’s seen teeth rip through a ribcage and swallow a heart and I can buy
dog tags at the mall, I can buy camouflage at the gap, I can stare at
the Vietnam Wall and forget it is missing the 2 million names of the 2 million vietnamese slain
So I can certainly forget about the little girl, her dog, the neighbor,
and whichever soldiers we choke-chained in the opposite
direction of God.
At 4 AM I find my father in the living room
the news caster says that the number of US soldiers killed in war this
month was outdone by the number that came home and committed
suicide.
Outside, there is a flag waving from our front door.
My father picked it out as carefully as he picked out my name when he built our
house.
I want to tell him that I still build my spine from the clothesline that holds his work shirts.
But I know I’d start crying
I’m exactly like him
We both have wrinkles around our eyes, a hundred years older than our ages
We both carry ourselves like ambulances with someone dead inside
hoping we’ll get there in time.
I didn’t get here in time.
This house echoes like an empty canteen,
flowers don’t survive long in the hands of thieves.
So much is wilting.
I look out the window at my father’s flag a glow in the
moonlight. I remember something I was told long ago
I was told in World War II, 80% of us soldiers could not bring themselves to kill
an enemy soldier they found sleeping.
Sleeping.
I want to ask my father if he thinks that is true, but I know he won’t
sleep if I do. And he needs to sleep
God knows we all do.
Andrea Gibson: Anything
No video available
Tonight I wanna slit my wrists
Hold the blood to God’s lips and say “taste this”
Tonight I could swear even the man in the moon
Is a rapist
And stars are nothing but scars
Bullet wounds from humanities drive
By firing at the face of the sky
Tonight crying would be too easy
It…
Photograph
I wish I was a photograph
Tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
You carried like a future in your back pocket
I wish I was that face you show to strangers
When they ask you where you come from
I wish I was that someone that you come from
Every time you get there
And when you get there
I wish I was that someone who got phone calls
And postcards saying
Wish you were here
I wish you were here
Autumn is the hardest season
The leaves are all falling
And they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground
And the trees are naked and lonely
I keep trying to tell them
New leaves will come around in the spring
But you can’t tell trees those things
They’re like me they just stand there
And don’t listen
I wish you were here
I’ve been missing you like crazy
I’ve been hazy eyed
Staring at the bottom of my glass again
Thinking of that time when it was so full
It was like we were tapping the moon for moonshine
Or sticking straws into the center of the sun
And sipping like icarus would forever kiss
The bullets from our guns
I never meant to fire you know
I know you never meant to fire lover
I know we never meant to hurt each other
Now the sky clicks from black to blue
And dusk looks like a bruise
I’ve been wrapping one night stands
Around my body like wedding bands
But none of them fit in the morning
They just slip off my fingers and slip out the door
And all that lingers is the scent of you
I once swore if I threw that scent into a wishing well
All the wishes in the world would come true
Do you remember
Do you remember the night I told you
I’ve never seen anything more perfect than
Than snow falling in the glow of a street light
Electricity bowing to nature
Mind bowing to heartbeat
This is gonna hurt bowing to I love you
I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around
Like children love recess bells
I still hear the sound of you
And think of playgrounds
Where outcasts who stutter
Beneath braces and bruises and acne
Finally learning that their rich handsome bullies
Are never gonna grow up to be happy
I think of happy when I think of you
So wherever you are I hope you’re happy
I really do
I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight
I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking
I hope your lungs are open and breathing your life
I hope there’s a kite in your hand
That’s flying all the way up to orion
And you still got a thousand yards of string to let out
I hope you’re smiling
Like god is pulling at the corners of your mouth
‘Cause I might be naked and lonely
Shaking branches for bones
But I’m still time zones away
From who I was the day before we met
You were the first mile
Where my heart broke a sweat
And I wish you were here
I wish you’d never left
But mostly I wish you well
I wish you my very very best
(a)Muse in[g] Training: A decade of death threats
“I hope you die, faggot.”
I turned 24 on February 17th. The first time someone told me that I should end my own life for being gay was when I was 14. I never truly understood what being gay meant until I was 16 or 17, and I still wasn’t sure if I fit the bill until right before I turned 18. That…
(a)Muse in[g] Training: I’m not gonna live my life on one side of an ampersand. Even if I went...
(i lovelovelove these first two lines; thank you, shay <3)
shayprose:
I’m not gonna live my life
on one side of an ampersand.
Even if I went with you,
I’m not the girl you think I am.I’m not gonna match you
‘cause I’ll lose my voice completely.
No, I’m not gonna watch you
‘cause I’m not the one that’s crazy.~~~
I may be romantic,
I may risk my life for…
EXACTLYYY!
bustygirlcomics:
Put those away
exactly
(Source: ileftmyheartinhollywood)
well that keeps it simple!
(via angelfaceeex3)
recovery
(via chivalrousdisast3r)
