I had a dream

 
about Bruce Lee
contorting the wind
in the retrofitted ruins of
what would appear to be maybe
a star-soaked Mayan temple absconded 
with bones of gods and prophets
to some gruff jungle relinquished
due south of the Yucatan—
 
be like water
is all I remember
him mentioning, gleaned
from a dozen or so documentaries, certainly, 
almost slavishly seized and absorbed
by my brother, who, having been
spurned by the Shaolin monks—
who whispered, 
you just couldn’t come here—maybe
existed in spluttering dust still swept
in the anxious dunes of abandoned Kandahar.
 
Be like water, Sean Bean
had got to him, Bravo Two Zero
and cheery Jack Ryan and
all of that let’s bomb a concept ephemera
cherub-cheeked Dubya salted
the schools with—
Best of the best, with honors, he thought
of the man in the black pajamas;
                 and so he succumbed
 
to the surf of a mirthless war to be
but a bit greater than
what frail frame some soul filled—arguing,
maybe just loving
his grandmother wasn’t
enough—caught
foaming up over the rim
to be quaffed and clung in the
throat of some glorious mission, yes,
scarcely a silvery hair sloughed. See
 
Bruce Lee 
contorting the wind
in a temple—
 
that was three years ago, wasn’t it? My,
 
I still can’t quietly rationalize just 
what cup he thought he was filling, though
still should the winds comb out of old Kandahar, 
doing with dunes what drooling demagogues dremel 
in what would seem no more than wistfully water-logged,
clots of wood,
 
like buoying apples you’d tactfully bob for, vying
to the please the court
of a young, All-American
prom queen, trans-dimensionally
                     pregnant, trying
                                     to smoke out her soul
                                     from a film tin, some
                                     three children spent
                                     from a billowing body,
                                     what dreams may come—he’s
 
immortalized there,
in a black scrap of highway
that salt from the crippled Atlantic’s
trying to tickle this wanton bone from—
gusseting grumbling seasides
riddled with twee-little thumb-faced,
skull-plump, wire-tied, crab-walking 
cadres of salt-scoured, clownfish retirees, 
content to contend that
maybe that man over there, with the 
coffee-skim skin and the name that 
requires one hack when ejecting it,
carries their woe like a snow globe 
tucked beneath what foul rag 
                               he’s arguing 
       works like a baseball cap—d’you think
                                                        he’s a marlin?