Flash-Back: a Haunting

I see an Army combat friend who stands alone in dim-lit shadows of a street-lamp's yellow glow. A shared piece of history has now arrived to tweak and trick my troubled mind. I gaze through dusted haze of curtains stained by painful years of shattered habits and regret. There's long jagged cracks on alabaster bone - like zippered seams cut clear across his skull. I greet his hollow-socket stare and crooked gash of toothless black now smiling back. His thin and fallow brittle-bones begin to rattle as a long-dead hand begins to slowly rise to make a haunted wave. A voice, like rumbles from the jungle heat of war, (fought fifty years ago) begins to speak: " You left me there, my guts still spillin' out my belly wound like vipers bursting forth from some old Pentecostal's burlap bag full-packed with angry snakes. I saw my bloody guts slippin' down into the muck, melding with the stink of godforsaken jungle rot. Why did you leave my carcass there - not carry me away from all that filthy, fetid stench of sweated death? " No answer that I give can make him live again or understand I have no answer to the "why" and yet I know he will return to ask again until one day I too have reached my end.