Writings and Poetry

when Taps is played

after we lost our first soldier, (a sniper shot his throat out) there was a ceremony for the battalion. I didn’t know the guy, but others did. there was something hollow about the whole thing. how many times can you say the exact same things for dead men before the fraudulence becomes obvious?

counting

my wife. my work.
desolate

another Kuwait poem. it came after crashing out into the desert in my Bradley Fighting Vehicle to do some shooting, and watching the Bedouin drive their herds.
night patrol

there is sometimes a very film noir feeling about the city. lately the wind and dust have all increased reminding me and my very literate roommate of Humphrey Bogart and the like. course we still have to patrol, and thus combat the elements as well. it can be...surreal.
5 years

my wife and I have been together for almost 5 years now. that is the basis. I experiment here with interspersing a story throughout the poem, they are related but not the same. this poems tends to vulgarity, profanity, and violence. it hurts a little. it has lot to do with judgment. about your past being held against you. about being a better man than you were. but, again it is about balance. about loving someone, being so far away from them, and being tasked with violence as your duty. there is also a lot about evolving from one life to another.
nothing punk rock

the last of the Kuwait poems, this is trying to understand distance. between home and here, between the past and future, and between who I was, who I am, and who I will be when this is all finished. it’s probably not finished. it is the first of a number with these themes.
as always

this is the first poem I wrote upon arriving in Kuwait. it and the few others from my Kuwait time concentrate a lot of the desert and it’s barrenness, against the back drop of pending combat. this is of course before I knew how little fighting I would see in my sector to date.

it is sad

sometimes it is still hard to balance my previous life with my current life. I don’t think arty poet boys join the infantry a lot. this deals with that juxtaposition and the differences you find among people from all over the country being put together to go very far from home and kill people. god has to come in somewhere and that is different for everyone. this is a reflection of me, not a literal representation; sometimes you can see yourself in the eyes of others. maybe finished maybe not.

are you listening?
for sean

my best friend back home sent me a poem he had written and it was like a punch in the gut. he and I have been writing and performing together since we were juniors in high school. as such we have traveled all over spitting poems at crowds that didn’t know what to make of us a lot of the time. he is brilliant. life however does not always want to allow for brilliance. he and I have both lost some of our youthful naïveté about poetry, and it is hard to swallow sometimes. this is what came of my response to him. anyone can read it, but it is written to him. feel free. I don’t know if it is finished or not.

Hom