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Recollections

By Gordon Perry

Gordon A. Perry 2323394
M 3/9, 3rd Marines
RVN, 4/67—4/70

Cordoned by security's barriers
Sanity fogs experience's harshest landscapes;
Blankets memory's poisoned streams, and devastated meadows, and forests.
Restless dreams penetrate the murk
Compelling recall to explore hope's wasteland.
Once more, fear-frayed voices protest;
Shock-stretched pupils stare at exhaustion, despair and plundered futures.

Yep, the five of us beat the odds,
Stayed together from boot camp to here.
Five ignorant grunts, soon disabused.
Fresh bodies don't go straight to the field,
Base-working parties mark their first day.
Standing at the battalion supply shed:
Awed by the Donald Duck voiced sergeant;
Red scar leering across his throat,
"Got it last fall, during Hastings...!"
With GI cans of boiling water and
Toilet bowl brushes; we cleaned deuce gear.
"Them? Yeah, they all went home—one way or another."
He offered as we scraped gore, skull plates
And hair from helmets; thinned, crusted blood
On flak-jackets, packs and webgear.
The spring sky swept by, fresh, light, and cool
Blowing away the cold and drench of monsoon.
Endless shades of green spread softly around
Covering grim crimson gouges and stifling
Percussive murmurs of war.
An office pogue came by, scarfing us up, at noon—
Against Division Orders—but what the hell.
Within a year that odds would beat us—
To pulp. We died, one way or another,
In bits and pieces, a little at a time.

She was ugly.
Sleek, with efficiency's viciousness.
Glowed grimly, black and hate-filled.
I met her when young,
Left her life times later.
I loved the ugly little whore—
She killed, maimed and wounded for me.

Enveloped in a deluge of flame,
A foetus betrayed,
He writhed to reclaim his breath.
The heart-beating link of fire
Rudely disbanded the congressed
Solemnity of molecules;
Disrupting their synapsed vitality,
Dispersing them.
My veins surged, renewed, as his life became mine.

Small, delicate, nut brown, supinely lying, nearly awash in an inhuman
Vastness of blood:
A child basking in a backyard wading pool.
His oval, bold-filled grimace
Silently hinting a the hammering horror
That labored through him
As his obedient heart strove to re-flood creation—if that was his whim.
"hung," the AK's wooden stock cautiously
whispered—sensing American about.

In a micro-mini-second
Of cosmic comprehension
Your eyes recognize
Destiny tapping
En clair
Your epitaph.
Transforming your meager spirit
Into mangled corpse.
Waste and rags so corrupted,
That all eternity
Will not coax your
Soul
To re-enter the hulked remains.

So what the fuck
You can't live forever
The lifers' always cluck.
You're just dumb grunts,
Life's curse.
Die mother-fuckers
The world won't be any worse.

My company has so long been of men only. The low longing that hated my diffidence and clumsy conversing, tumorously grew deforming my eyes. Love now seems the endless dying of friends and expresses itself tentatively awaiting smashing round and cutting shrapnel's certainty.