Poetry by John Stanizzi

SNIPER

                                    America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing…

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

                                                …from America by Allan Ginsberg

America, I’ve also given you my all,

more or less,

and depending of course

on what you mean by all.

I too am rapidly becoming nothing,

bluffing about what I know

of the suffering of the aboriginals,

which always results in bloodshed and hatred

and a brand of entitlement

that deserves a slap in the face,

hands around the throat,

or at least a fistful of orange hair.

There’s always the perpetual return of olive drab advances

to the precipice

(again, as usual)

of Whitman’s debris and debris of dismal soldiers

whose woeful sighs always

run in blood down proverbial palace walls.

Even when we were kids

we were troubled by nightmares

of what began simply as odd sounding words

which morphed eventually

into things to be feared -- 

rice paddies, hooches, booby traps,

Charlie, Gooks, VC,

daylight whores, massage parlors

with “additional services,”

flower boats afloat in the channel,

places to get the “plumbing cleaned.”

I read about the place where you killed --

Quang Nam Province --

so close to the beach

I’d bet during your first few minutes there

you thought it was beautiful.

4,000 impermeable square miles,

solid dense green and black shadows

and heat heat heat

just this side of flammable,

and where thousands “soldiers” were

shredded burst pulverized minced milled immolated detonated.

I imagine you were listening to

the melancholy seduction of the sea

as you stood guard duty that night;

there would be no leaving your post,

not even for the siren song you were sure

was just a couple of hundred yards that way,

through the jungle.

There were tense weapons

hanging from tree limbs

and buried in the ground,

and you, who could be darkly serious,

magically perceptive,

could not have pictured,

even in this place that rained death,

the “other” weaponry,

the cigarette smoking vaginas,

the ones that shot out arrows,

or the deadly ones that hid razors.

You were an 18-year-old Marine

from East Hartford;

such things were unimaginable.

And not that it would have mattered,

but there might have been a cautionary tale about the sniper fire

that would slash through black leaves

in the black dark,

blasting through your neck,

spraying out your life

with one small spatter of blood,

a few strips of ragged skin,

and all the memories, plans,

bravado, loves, hates, fears

detonated in that splash

before your heavy falling,

your limp-kneed blank collapse

onto the teeming jungle floor,

absorbed by the creatures there,

consumed by the noise of a fire fight,

the sound your dropped M-16 made

clanking against your M-1 helmet

launched from your head by the impact,

and I still can’t say what it was you died for.

You became 19 forever that moment,

getting rained on, stepped on, eventually forgotten,

while the rest of us were

wasting our lives

getting high, drunk, depressed, divorced,

panic sieved mental cripples

whose wrinkled notion of aging

meant not raging against the dying of anything,

not even our faded out brothers and sisters

who have been holding perfectly still

for decades

waiting for absolutely nothing.

DREAM OF A MANSION WAY OUT THERE

…the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting…   

T.S. Eliot

            …from The Fire Sermon

            The Waste Land

May mist lifts the mansion

from its foundation

swirls it off   

away from this back-country road

to some other place

more prepared for such flashiness –

gone the massive black mechanical wrought-iron locking gate

the heated driveway long as a football field

lit by a row of lamplights

under which no taxi throbs

waiting for no one

for there is no time

not this evening

not under this starlight

not for you

not for me --

vanished the topiary of bizarre spirals

the perimeter of boulders along the shoulder of the road

which whisper keep off the emerald grass

which is also gone

and gone too are the bluebirds

who ignored the bluebird houses

with their kitschy copper roofs --

all that remains is a field

of overgrown recollections

one gaunt cow lowing

and a sparsely clouded sky

stirred by swallows

who will never know the tawdry scene

or the vulgar little houses

they would have been expected to embrace --

I think of summers in Hartford

the sidewalks

where pigeons would soft-rattle their iridescence

just out of reach

close enough to touch

close enough to think you might be able to hold one

and oh how their tumbling syllables trilled

simple and rounded

their glowing rings shone

and their pebble-gray wattles

were stones of proud bone --

I learned from them where I belonged –       

in the luxurious landscape of stillness

way out there

the city dwellers would comment

and where I didn’t belong –

in the newly brute landscape…