When your future is uncertain
And your world filled with stress,
Can you mitigate the worst,
And still work for the best?
Can you find hope and happiness
Despite the setbacks,
While girding yourself daily
For life’s constant attacks?
In your moments of sorrow,
Can you still find some ways
To look beyond the chaos-
See through to better days?
Can you view the great maelstrom
And recognize how the spin
Is nothing more or less
Than how opposing currents descend?
Our lifetime is a struggle,
From our birth to our grave,
But all that is required to live successfully
Is to stand and be brave!
So let the storms billow over
Till they lose power and end,
Hold on to your hope
And be human my friend!
Wounded (She Doesn’t Read My Poems)
My wife doesn’t read my poems
Unless I write on light, airy, happy things
I really don’t blame her
She was there in the dark times
And watched me live through them
She doesn’t enjoy watching
Me rip open old wounds
To see if the maggots
Are still lingering inside
She doesn’t know
The names of my demons
But she knows their sounds-
A scream out from my sleep
She knows how they feel-
As I alternate between clawing at her
And pushing her out of bed
To get her down
Below the line of fire
Another soldier to save
From the deadly battlefield
She knows the demon’s shape and smell-
I’m suddenly upright at 3AM
Stagnant and salty in my cold sweat
I dreamt again of the day I stood up tall
Atop the armored vehicle
To prove that it was safe
To get everyone to stop firing
To try and get a grip on
Indiscipline driven by fear
Exposing myself yet again
Because someone needed
To calm the panic
Of overactive imaginations
And that task fell to me
Because it was my responsibility
To assess the risks
And to get the job done
Sometimes in my dream
The sniper IS still there
And I’m wrong in my assessment
So I don’t walk away
After standing up
To get everyone’s attention
Instead of being in charge
Of evacuating the wounded
In this dream, I’m on the ground
At the Casualty Collection Point
And Doc Turner is trying
To get the bleeding stopped
As the demons circle round me
I hate being wrong
And not being in control
Then suddenly I’m bolted awake
Sitting upright in a cold sweat
And I can feel the maggots
Crawling around under my skin
And I’m never completely sure
If this means the wounds are rotten
Or if this is medicinal-
The eating away of dead flesh
So that only living remains.
Accuracy and Truth
One can do military math
On a cardboard box
Using slide rules
Whiz wheels and pins
On a plotting board
Solving ballistic geometry
Manually
Safely calculating
All the elements
Of accurate predicted fire
I used to fill out safety tables
In my head and then
On a scrap of green memo paper
That would get passed to the guns
Now computers do the hard work
In zeros and ones
The precision of navigation systems
Blue Force Tracker and
Command Post of the Future
Are supposed to prevent
The errors that used to creep in
To manual gunnery
But
All of my nightmares
From 25 years of service
Have to do with bombs
Artillery rounds and rockets
Falling where they weren’t intended
Miscommunication
Load elevation
Miss-orientation
False identification
Wrong Laser codes
Wrong attack angle
Danger Close
Human error
Gets men and women
Killed
Garbage In
Garbage Out
Flash and Boom
Reverberation
And Then
Radio Silence
Fort Knox
While he was training,
She did unprepared.
Raising the little girl,
Visiting when she could.
300 miles in Caprice
The car overheated.
Rolling into a pitstop
Of just a single pump.
Sipping coke, waiting
With a three-year-old,
for the Hillman to fix
A broken water hose.
There wasn’t enough,
The check’d bounce,
No, they’d eat later.
Will you go to sleep?
The girl kept talking,
And worse, noticing.
A pack of cigarettes,
Six hours left to go.
Arriving at Ft Knox,
There was no gold,
But a sea of green,
Gems in geodes.
“You want to know
What mother did?”
Only if she wants
To tell, Nana said.
The girl dismissed,
Another secret safe,
And the transmission
Was the only neutral.