Thick Men of War

((Poetic prose) (an anecdote, with figurative language, and intensity))


Afghanistan and Iraq

They are all dead now, once thick men, now dead and bloated, a little pale about the face. Their wives and children in rural and suburban homes, not nearly paid for, with long green lawns in which they need mowing.
These hard, lean, thick men, who drank and fought hard, which because their country found a war for them to fight, became dead, was not quite as they had thought, or perhaps heard war would be. That is why this story is amalgamated.
Thus, with a brief look, glimpse, one with little depth, no perspective, there they stood in sight, these thick men of war—doing for all what the country could bear, and become in the flash of a weapon pointed at them, somewhere—not perhaps even knowing where, within an instant, became dead.


The Bored

Whoever, or whatever started these events, that lead to war, those folks that offered their country bodies to carry us for little or nothing—through war, who never saw these thick men wail with solid liveliness, now dead bodies, these men that run around the sides, I pray they get bored with it all, and whoever they are and whatever they’ve become, take control of events and end it all.


Vietnam

These same kinds of thick men were with me in Vietnam used a vocabulary of perhaps two-hundred words, yet I daresay it was enough to tell: where, how and sometimes ask why—save, that they lived long enough to spit it all out.
That’s the bad thing about war, you just never know.

No: 459/8-28-2009••