Long Tracers Poems

Stokey 2014

I am working the door

At an all night bar

Sometimes I think I have spent too much time alone.  These long nights remind me of flowers and effigies. I drink too much.  There’s...

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Crouching down, I'm foxhole bound,
crawling forward I seen it, its around.
I ducked my head, while covering one eye,
as soon as the enemies flare lit up the night sky.
Machine gun bullets quickly sprayed my above,
tracer rounds...

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All over pure and white, all over plain and bright,
we're inborn peace embracers, true tranquility tracers.
All the time abstaining from vileness, violence and violation,
we've lived our self-disciplined lives generation after generation. 

Sometimes nightmare befalls more...

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They were young then, now they would be old men looking across an empty beach, the sun at their back; for many this would be their last day to grow old; dead in the water;...

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The desolate perfection of solitude. The shiver of recognition that there is only one being on the mountain, and that’s you. The pine trees watch, the boulders brood, but there is no one there. The...

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Tasseled Dreams


The thought of the future we will never have was pollinating foul fuzzy particles in the air, 
slowly following the wake of all those tasseled dreams I held onto to for far too long....

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Sitting and waiting for the whistle to blow again twice in just one day,
I sat and watched the various signs, the returning spring across fields,
In a copse there was a wood lark singing also in...

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Sitting and waiting for the whistle to blow again twice in just one day,
I sat and watched the various signs, the returning spring across fields,
In a copse there was a wood lark singing also in...

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A Poem [ Viet Nam]
                              ...

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let's speak of the unspeakable
the horrid, heartless, maybe headless tale

let's speak of small children, 
gaunt with indifference, both of and for
the sunken eyes, the distended belly
the insects hovering about...waiting

let's speak of hospital corridors
hushed conversations with...

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I am nearing the end of my journey
The path that I walk is almost done,
Over my shoulder are friends now gone?
In front of me a life, underpinned by yesterday’s fear
For I am in a world...

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Vietnam was Fifty Years Ago
By Franklin Price
8/30/2018

Vietnam was fifty years ago
Around the world across the sea
God went with me on tour
Now it's just a memory

The Air Force was my service branch
Ground navigation was my field
...

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Tumor consciousness

Tumor of the bloody brain,
lays me low and causes pain,
consciousness does slip an slide,
other lifetimes can't decide
which one is the self?

Leap aboard a ME109,
here are coming British swine,
tracers bouncing past just fine,
weave a little,...

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spring melts into summer’s light
proving wrong that still despair,
chilled in winter’s heart,
has corroded to the marrow

for even poppies bloom
in broken fields and shell holes
bones blanketed in shrouds of moss
trill of larks cross no man’s land

as...

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A HOT LZ AT NIGHT

Rotors swimming in the air,
my feet towards the skids;
flying fast in darkness. 

Pack tight against my body,
one hand for the bird,
one hand for the rifle.

Tracers lazily float upward
feeling the sky for...

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time 
distortions of memory 
tricks played out 
of things thought but not 
old photos tell stranger tales 
of two dimensional places 
of younger eyes 
and tender faces 
8mm and slideshows 
or lockets clasp'd 
kodachrome and...

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Streaking skyward the tracers rip
Into hanging soldiers
Falling about into mayhem
Pulsing through blood-filled ears
Hearing comrades scream
Understanding nothing
This is the war I found…

Hatred filled hardened hunter
Into smashed building
Homes pulverized rubble
Strewn about the decaying mass
The scorched metal burning
Bodies...

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Fear

A dark night and all seems well 
When out of nowhere, the bright burst
This stirs so much to tell
People running to the berm
Rifles firing, mortars thumping and people screaming
  
I go my area and...

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Their faces he’ll no longer see 
Their lives were lived then gone 
Players in the game of death 
The brave, the dead, the pawns 
How many mothers cry these days? 
How many still aren’t the...

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We awoke to the crack of rifle fire, 
With mortar rounds hitting the ground near by.
The flying shrapnel was absorbed by sand bags, 
Which saved lots of us who wished not to die.

The hot spent...

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I was told those who care less suffer less
I believed
I was doing this for you
Pretending not to care 
Not when we shot those arty rounds
Not when we threw chemicals at you
Not as I rejoiced at...

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BLACK BREWRIES BRAVENESS

Black brewries braveness
In ink incorporative individualism
Those Thinny tracers ticking Time
Be-little black  braveness baselessly
Mirror my motion moves momentously
Directed diagonal  deeply 
Hurt humans heart heavy
Because better black believes
Dedication, determined destinies 
Of our oddity...

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