NIGHTMARES!
purple ducks
under a river bridge . . .
brown bags
robert d wilson
©2010
When I was shipped Stateside after my tour of duty in Nam, I disembarked an airliner at Travis Air Force Base and soon learned that I'd anded in the middle another war zone. This was a war unlike the one we fought in Vietnam. America was engaged in a civil and uncivil war between millions of young people and adults who no longer bought what our government advocated regarding the Vietnam War
and the way it ran the country with the immoral help of the CIA ,the FBI, and those supporting military Industrial Complex, a trillion dollar industry supported by Firestone Rubber, Shell Oil, the Tungsten industry, and others who had financial interests in South Vietnam, even though it meant endorsing two consecutive dictators, as ruthless or more than the Communists we were fighting.
Over 50,000 American lost their lives there, million were maimed physically and/or psychologically ( I am one of them ). Millions of civilians were murdered by both sides. We napalmed innocent women and children, lighting up their frail bodies like roman candles. The enemy had multiple casualties and like us, were doing what we were ordered to do by the U.S. Congress and the North Vietnamese Communist party closely aligned with China, the Communist nuclear armed country that literally keeps WalMart and other stores afloat due to China's use of child and slave labor.
Runaway teenagers, rich kids, the heir to the Ford Automotive industry, and others wore miss-match clothing that defied the so called norm, whatever that means and whoever made it, walking aimlessly through the maze inside Timothy Leary's emptying mind; the Harvard University Psychology professor who openly promoted the use of LSD like P.T. Barnum, a drug legally prescribed by psychiatrists until 1967, to insane patients in hope of giving them an alternative route to sanity; shouting the anthem: "Turn off, Tune in, and Turn on!"
Sang Stephen Stills with the Buffalo Springfield:
"There's something happening here.
What it is ain't exactly clear.
There's man with a gun over there
telling me i've got to beware . . . "
The America I came home to was not the America I'd left. There was no warm welcome for us. People threw eggs at us, called us baby killers, and the VA refused to give us counseling. We were an anathema to many people. The first day I got home, I visited my fiance. She never let me inside. She said I'd changed and closed the door on me. I got in a motorbike accident that same week. I was riding home from a friend's house high on hashish, and a car broadsides me shooting the bike and me 50 feet in the air down the street. Needless to say I was a bloody mess with rocks imbedded in my knees, etc. I asked the car's driver (his family was in the sedan as well) if he was alright. He looked at me increduously and said, "No, are you alright?" He drove me to my parent's house and the look on my mother's face when she saw the condition I was in, is unforgettable. I left the family home two weeks later, unable to adhere to my parent;s rules of being in bed by ten every week night. I've slept in a car with an u-pottie trained puppy, lived in an awol sanctuary in an historic Unitarian church, and once rented a house with a friend for $40 a month, which had no electricity or heat. And the toilet wasn't fastened to the ground. I went through a variety of job before going to college. If I went into detail about everything that happened when I came home you think I'm crazy. One is never the same after living in a war zone. Think if the Vietnamese who had to live in it all their lives.
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if i didn't
know better and i
don't, i'd
think she pushed me
over a cliff
aft, she calls
summer a dream she
can't live with
the moon
tonight, fed you a
hamburger
made of missed vowels . . .
shared with co-workers
anger seethes
inside of my cone . . .
like taal
will the walls
speak to me again
in waves . . .
impersonating
the voice of God?
many roles
to play, and secrets . . .
chance of rain?
just like
always, the poor
bitches take
you for a ride, to
get the golden egg
is it karma,
my being used?
cloudy skies
the poor here
bereft of spirit,
of feeling . . .
they dance the dance
of christmas lights
dancing with
a mannequin . . .
late spring
at night, when
porcelain saints sleep
in boxes
their husbands get drunk
and sleep with those who feel
feelings?
watching the tide
go out
she wants to
know what i'd do if she
falls asleep
while i fuck her . . .
masturbation?
nightmares . . .
belong to those who
swallow spring
she sings a
different song, fucking
other men,
a job, she says, my work . . .
telling me sleep
her womb
a lair to further
summer
she won't fall
asleep on the job or
need a lube . . .
our dreams moored in
different harbors
markham's
man with the hoe, a
salted egg?
the unborn
baby her mother
blessed, can
be a bastard . . .
swathed in semen
are they
whores, sharing dreams
with summer?
marriage,
a dream encouraged
by the cloth . . .
a farmer planting
too many fields
she hangs my
dick on poison oak . . .
summer drought
hate keeps me
from getting used . . .
the acid in
dragon's belly,
a lubricant
to be a
wren and complain
to the sun!
he cares more
for his prize rooster
than his wife . . .
sunday morning, his
path to the promised land
trike drivers
play tong-its* waiting
for summer
*tong-its is a gambling Filipino card game
played in a mah jhong style.
careful, the
footsteps crossing
your path . . .
could be words searching
for a place to rest
will she nest
tonight before summer
and dry grass?
are they stars,
the sparkles on the
lake . . . or thoughts?
why the wrath,
the sarcasm in
your voice?
was it a memory
i reminded you of?
waiting for
an egret to sod the
grass with song
early to
rise, these songbirds,
but not
before the rooster . . .
lifting up his wings
a three lined
poem, a haiku?
scattered clouds
tomorrow's
balut, the duck's eggs . . .
the cold, brown
hand of her owner
slipping underneath
she stared a
hole through my wife . . .
a draught year?
a stolen
kiss, the thought of some
one holding
you close to his bare
chest, asking for nothing
why do i
wade chest deep in
another's bath?
madness, the fulfillment
of a nightmare?
robert d. wilson
©2010
