Veteran of Foreign Wars

So delicate and fierce – how prettily
you've worn your scars! – gone into endless
battles under all the crimson bannered
gory glorious shenanigans of Mars: you
are the war god of luxuriously wild extremities –
you demand amenities: warm oak church
interiors and fancy sharp Italian dress:

won't stand for less than what you've soldiered
your rash way again, again to conjure
up as best: swift sex, and God, and ghosts
of fat cat politicians and tubercular small
children whom you regularly query – buried
long ago in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery
sod: they've tested you, arrested you,

remanded you to psych wards as bipolar
but the secret is you've seen the solar and
the lunar scapes of human hearts, and you
will always fight in foreign wars again to master
arts of living recklessly therein. How ready
I am always to believe you're sprouting
wings! I look at you and do not know a thing.


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