There
wasn’t the meat enough
left for an Irish wake and 
scarcely a casket
to close—I felt
 
in the damp boiserie,
    the wood-panelling ruffling, each
           of my mother’s screams,
 
wet, sobbing screams snapped
shrill as a rat-tailed rag ripped
twisted and whipped 
on a spluttering ear drum, screams
squeezed clean from the sweating wood,
some swelling sap seized 
powdery amber, what wan must
 
of a cigarette carton suckled to
cherry-stem chains of chafing appraisals
impressing the soft-pine prints 
of a calf box, smoke swoln inward, 
dross of a veal chop. Oh, though how
 
his mother just 
had to see him
to make it real or
all the more maybe
debunk my hunchbacked cousin’s cleaving 
joke about how he’d been tapped
by a furthermore secret allegiance of
spies, some impossible missions program,
or some swell, hare-lipped fantasy Clancy
expressed in a noisome deathbed confession.
 
They wanted to keep the shoebox clasped, see,
nobody wants to see how the sausage
is made, ma’am.
 
Teabagging,
butt-to-nut renditions of
raiding a Bedouin’s shack
in the barrack’s shower,
ringworm wrestled from
salt-scuzzed Rome-red foam 
rubber wrestling mats—
It was Born on the Fourth of July
he watched just ten thin years shy of catching some 
                bus to Georgia. 
Benning. Ranger training. Citrus canker.
Rust-red needles like knitted syringes. Know,
                     he was born 
but fifteen days thereafter
America’s birthday, ’85.
He found all of theatre unseemly, tried
to perfect his body in sweat and movement,
tried; though unlike the Daoist alchemists,
talking in tongues among slyly
nourishing herbs, he thought
First Blood was a plinth for the monomyth, just
some glorying dance cycle shyly
observed between Bedouin hamlets
and box homes, something you’d stubble
with Christmas stockings, empty hose now
magically bulging.
 
Shots of Bailey’s slurped from a boot, yes,
that was the petering pass time 
pressed like a rabbit’s foot ‘twixt
storming shacks in Kandahar, picking
out lice-like piles of prised ideologies 
hiding in pakuls and burkas and hijabs,
running white, saddened sands an uncomely
red out of fear, out of justice, acceptance,
exceptionalism, just money enough 
to pay off a Toyota Tundra, health
insurance, a plump little pension, pride,
just the apple-eyed thrill of some golden
G. I. bill—just play
Alaska Wolf Billy Jack Joe for maybe, a
tour or two more to secure some
broken colt of a hollow-point future,
brusquely exploding through, virtually,
any old obstacle. How
 
he went cross-eyed
mentioning Mike, who had
seemed so pleased to be squeezing
something—a trigger. Then
 
shots of Bailey’s sucked from a boot,
though it wasn’t a shot that’d got him
to fill out a gilt little shoe box, no.
 
They were crossing a land bridge.
Ned got an awkward feeling and
asked my brother to lead the wedge,
trim tip of the wriggling chevron,
over what seemed no more 
than a slumbering banshee’s breast
swept under a sand dune. Lo, and behold,
 
the big bang incarnate, the land 
mine, pressurized IED no more
than a beetle bent over the concrete—
Six short tours, borne green as a bottle fly
Yours tr—Pakuls and burkas and hijabs, oh my.
 
See Satellite Beach,
an ulcerous tittle or bleeter ball
beat in the Flower’s flanks, 
where people were often 
resigned to die 
or preserve frail flesh left, rubbing
the salt-rime, scrubbed from their
scumbling tires daily, 
into these caviling crow’s feet.
 
There was a sub shop touting
a hunchbacked billiards table.
 
There was a school with a dolphin mascot,
call it a pod or a ship in a tuna tin. Also a scorpion,
Scottie dog, something akin to a pirate, hiding 
a sparkling walleye. 
 
 
 
                                  There was
Pinocchio’s thumbprint, nose, and foreskin
furnishing splintered partitions, cracked ribs
of a funeral parlor—Pinocchio, though with a
few frail strings attached. Some
 
fifteen years now buried,
three head stones cast
to discard a garroting patina
left lichen green as the envious
grass blades passed by the hiccuping,
scythe-shy greensman, green as the 
plantain gripping the earth
in impervious petrichor pressed
from but tongue-teased ash, my
 
mother requests of me, giggling,
There’s this man who runs
this Warrior training program
who puts out a rag of sorts
each training session that
honors a fallen soldier. He
wishes to honor your brother
now. They had been bunkmates
in basic, albeit scarcely said
a cross word to each other.
I’d like you to furnish an anecdote
for him, for his Warrior training 
 
program. In merry ought-nine,
with Dubya ousted at last, I
opened my eulogy up with a
whale-dick joke and a deadpan
comparison, zipping my brother with
Ferrell and Stone’s young Alexander 
the character. That was the closest
that anyone came to but muttering
anything other than, he was a soldier.
 
The greatest sacrifice. No one so much
as even began to conceive of stirring
their tongue toward, Wouldn’t you know
that Pinocchio’s still his favorite Disney
movie—maybe to dance in the fantasy.
 
On his life insurance forms, 
he’d asked that The Pixies play
Where is my mind? in the 
skidmarked event of his passing,
just from the acned cheeks of a
boom box even. My mother thought, God,
 
he must be kidding—albeit, how
now she counts out the photographs,
looking like one who might tickle out Christ
from a tender splinter of sun-shucked dandruff-buff driftwood. Stiff
 
-er than driftwood, maybe, something
perfected, alas, last dollop of sweat sopped
dry as black powder chrysanthemums, dandruff
brushed from a velvet canvas, teasing a sun beam
still and stiff as a heartbeat listing leisurely
into a thirsting eternity, teased—the spirit
of Bailey’s choking some crumbling in-sole.