Inspired, Ken. One of your many best.
> BUGHOUSE
> (for Phil)
>
> Sitting wasted each night in front of the tube,
> we watched Uncle Walter fill the Home Front in
> about the latest disaster at some place called Hue
> or Suk Mai Wang, and CBS'd run the newsreels,
> and if the mood was right and the dope just strong enough,
> I'd see the Medevac choppers swarm from the sky
> and think how they looked like giant insects,
> dragonflys, or the gentle terrifying praying mantis.
> And I knew my friend (or ex-friend) Phil
> rode the insides of the bug,
> post-induction C.O. schmuck whose gentle heart
> recoiled not at war but at the thought
> that little men he couldn't see, in black pajamas,
> could swing from vines out of his nightmares
> to kill specifically _him_.
>
> So now beneath the rotors and the screams
> of engines and of 19-year-old babies
> from Paterson and Providence, ABD-bored
> grad school dropouts from Case Western or Wayne State,
> western PA high school football stars now sans
> legs, dicks, and shame--he, Phil, crawled
> through a lurching, slimy tube
> of running jungle ulcers, shell-burst seminal vesicles,
> unconscious voided bowels, and always always blood
> (the reassuring constant),
> offering morphine and dilaudid hits
> like the Rican dealers we hung with
> in the West Bronx, _bueno caca_, man, no charge.
>
> Technicolor imagery floats up from hash-pipes,
> an insect, a larva, a cocoon: _Wow, maaaaan,
> but it looks so coooool when you're stoned!_
> and years later, a man I worked beside told me
> about the flowers he grew in the Cambodian jungle,
> the spore of the B-52 seeding the earth
> from forty thousand feet, and how the dawn
> came up like thunder from China 'cross the bay,
> and how the colors refracted through the morning clouds
> like a science project: so he was not in his work
> and his work was not in him.
> And I thought then of Phil, shot in one day
> from the bug of the chopper into the womb
> of a World-bound transport, born and born
> again, not in the colors of flowers or
> in the imagery of the insect world,
> but into Discharge, ejaculation,
> the death seed disembodied,
> finding disappearance, a sad room,
> a grimy street, a silence
> only metaphor can describe.
>
> KTW/3-14-96, 8/22/07
>
>
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