CHERISH HODGEMENTAL CONFESSIONSIt never comes out right. All thoughts race to the finish line of my mind to be the first born under a moment of honesty about the reality that faces us day to day. Slapping at us happily like history when we rolled around in the dirt angrily, while someone watched joyously, yelling it out relentlessly, "this will teach you to be a man!" Even for the most poetic of "our kind", I feel within my bones it is all the same. What energy or faith could be placed on words when we don't even speak the same language of the heart?
Go. Simply, just go and see. And I don't mean the bronzed monuments or wall of names or areas of protests in your hometown. Go to where it all starts with the longing cries, itchy standard issued blankets, jimi deans and worn rifles that jam up every time you use them. Go where rounds go popping like cute little noises and annoy the butterflies that don't understand your intent on killing. Go where it smells to fucking high hell, where we purge altered solvency, take up home and make spoiled children of ourselves and our grandfathers' name. It's just a baby crying, a mom lying dead on her own floor, an old man begging you to stop, or a girl running away and being caught by 3 or 4 or 7 of our men. Just a young kid being loaded up, bound and gagged. All through time.... not just then or now but certainly later as well, by god, I promise you that. These moments cross our rivers of valued humanity and pilfer all that's good about life and light and love every moment we turn complacent and forget for even just a second what that military agenda really means.
Or stay. I don't care and I don't think at the end of the day, anyone else will either. There are bigger fish to fry with that goddamned ghost running around in my head.
"Name, date of rank" and so on it blabbers. Fool doesn't even know he's dead. But I do! I feel it in my soul. The words won't come and blood is shunted from my hands and a vein on my forward throbs and my shoulders tingle and my throat goes dry and I feel like crying and I feel like choking someone all at the same time. This.... whaling ghost won't just shut.... up....
"Name, date of rank."
I'll do anything to make it stop. Even go away again if it'll just stop.
See, what would one want me to say? I'm not out to turn your stomach or cop tears or provoke anger. I know nothing really will. Nothing had for me. Not the way it should've, anyway. For all the years and all the ghost still digging fox holes in their minds and sharing a smoke, do they go merrily agreeing while we plan our days blissfully and completely unaware of the fog rolling in on two kids: "Fuckin' A man. Fuckin' A. They ain't coming. No one can hear us and we don't belong anymore anyway, man, you know that. Wha', go home and tell them what you just did to that pig son of a bitch over there? They won't understand, man. This is your home now. We're your family. Just forget about it. You died a long time ago, you know. You're buried and already forgotten. Just forget about it. They won't want your problems anyway. No one wants us back."
We're all pale ghosts of a spirit that became entangled because of good intentions. Farm boys, city girls, and young fathers or struggling moms. I don't think anyone ever emerges the same, let alone better. That's not military agenda despite what their enlistment brochure says.
Again, they're still arguing:
"Don't you see, man? They took us away and shaved off some part of my mind along with my hair. That shit made us real, you know.... You try to be better, and they strike you down before you even get the chance. They just want bodies... Bodies and, you know... a Hometown Recruiter." It feels as though we're not human anymore. We're little mystical broken things to be studied and used to figure out what exactly went wrong. How come we broke so quickly? We pulled away and said no, put down our rifles and spoke out against the wrong, the terrible and the hushed. Broken, too when we first pulled into the driveway of the family home. We didn't belong here either even after the welcome backs and the hugs. Drunk most the time, can't keep a job; humor is sick, I guess no one finds dead animals, fucking drunk girls, or degrading other people funny; Can't be around women; their nothing but pussy to me. Even to other females, we're all equally hated - by each other and ourselves.
Men never grow up really. Men become fools and dangers to society, to their wives and kids. Mal adapted, mentally cracked. This is all too silent so we lay sleeping together to let us never be alone or reminded of that fearful loneliness that is also, "standard issue." This broke hearts the most. Around it goes in my head... "Anything to make the ghost shut up. A six pack, a bus ticket, a bottle of anti-depressants, anything to make it just shut up." And finally, like in most of life's matters, I'm assigned to formally realize there's no poetry to this. Poetry is pretty, rhythmic, lyrical and seductive. Its slightest spoken words will paste blush to your face, making you turn away and say "awe... how beautiful." But that's not what this is meant to be.
Such a sad, terrible thing to try and fit the mass reality into a small, simplistic mental image. This is entirely disrespectful though we try so very hard not to spit on our young fallen. What we did here, what we saw here, what we learned here to do anywhere and what we have now become are only your most vaguely recalled news headlines, brimming mental health facilities, piled VA paperwork and still so utterly alone drug addicts, alcoholics, victims of psychosis and inevitably suicide. Still, to my knowledge, the only poetry that infiltrates our lives is the poetic justice we strive to know about. Indeed, it feels warm to hear it. However, that justice does not, my friend, belong to any soldier or man known of god within the walls of warfare. That justice, our signed away standard issued justice, reeks of dead souls and faceless demons rotting inside my mind every hour of every day. Reaching, continuously, and ever so asking "Why? Why not me? Why, for god sakes, wasn't it me?"
I bow my head in humility when I confess what I have felt. What my ghost has recanted and shared with me. Still, I collapse to floor when I hear a tiny voice inside my heart suggest it's own agenda: "Why not us all, soldier? Why not us all..... We should all have a ghost in our mind. We'll breed the suicide, the festering anger and the phantom pain. We'll help those who wish to truly understand and even those who don't care to. We'll reenact shameful moments, even the ones we'll be seen as evil for. Where we ruined the weak, stole life from the frail and laughed the entire time. We'll remain incoherent, fall down drunk and vomit on open sidewalks. We'll look for a strong necktie or rope or several VA issued bottles of numbness that will make it all go away... We'll share the "sacrifice" we sought after with those good intentions. We'll share it all... Then maybe one day, too, our ill fated poetry will sound the same."
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CHERISH HODGE |
