Spinning out of control...
Like a child,
Never feeling...
Dizzy
Cant see...
Through the fog
Gears & Cogs
Turning...
Broken... record
Screaming
Unheard
Time...
Not enough
The road ahead is looking rough.
The webs & string
Holding
Everything... together
Tiny spiders in my head
Am I leading or am I being lead?
Spinning...
Watching the Stars
Turn into tracers...
Take the Shot! No need for chasers...
Dizzy...
Cant see...
The path in front of me
Has turned blurry.
Categories:
tracers, anxiety, depression, loneliness,
Form: Rhyme
Visions unendurable
Thoughts not erasable
Tracers of red
Running through my heard
Yellow smoke for the dust off
Brings tears
Death and destruction
Memories of loss
Haunting images
Ghosts haunting me
Blood on my hands
Unable to clean
Youth destroyed
By war
Hate and anger
Unknown to me
Until The War
Tribute To All Veterans on
Veterans Day
Categories:
tracers, veterans day, war,
Form: Free verse
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 prey,
our sound their only target.
These deadly green fireflies,
green streaks when they pass,
silent in our windy passage.
Darkness hides the bird
from these crisscrossing tracers
hungrily searching our sound.
Charles also has this darkness
and he will use it to catch us
if we can’t quickly slip away.
In this game of hide and seek
to be tagged by the enemy
is a touch of deadly force.
The bird rocks and rotors flair
signalling a leap from the skids;
feet to hit dark unfriendly ground
The darkness our only sanction,
the unseen ground our uncertainty,
unless we can run fast and far.
If they sit quietly and hold the LZ
green tracers will blossom brightly
their sudden much unwanted welcome.
If hit the bird may never lift away
our option stay with the crew;
all this makes for a short patrol.
I often live this nightly madness,
watching buoyantly rising tracers,
playing the odds in our year of fate.
Categories:
tracers, anxiety, conflict, dark, fear,
Form: Free verse
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 look into the night
There it is a big firefight
Red tracers, green ones too, crossing and hitting the berm
Like a fireworks display
The night seems like it will never end
In area's is louder and more
I wonder if people know the pain of war
As the sun begins to rise, you look out in the space
There are no bodies, nothing not even a trace that it all happened
Your mind starts to wonder if it even happened or was it a dream
You don't know until the end
When you hear who got hurt, or who is dead
Yes this is war, this is the price people pay to keep a nation free
Yet those at home don't understand
Children running around, people talking
When our national anthem is played
They don't know the price of freedom
Like those men and woman who are in graves.
Categories:
tracers, anger, anxiety, care, confusion,
Form: Lyric
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 your death
Relieved when the angels of anarchy
Flew to save us from your armor
I pretended not to care
That you had mothers
Brothers, sisters, children
I had that choice watching
Tracers dash across towards you
All this time I pretended
It was ok
No longer containable
within it explodes
It was a lie
Knowing I lament
I am Cain
Categories:
tracers, conflict, emotions, feelings, grief,
Form: Free verse
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 obviously occupied.
We welcome world words with warrant
Blacks built braveness buxom butterflies
Enlightment enchanting ego enlarged
Decade braveness debut delightfully.
Categories:
tracers, africa, age, america, art,
Form: Alliteration
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 sepia
and oh! there's a cameo hidden
in the back of grandfather's pocketwatch
(it isn't grandmother and her name sounds French!)
but they're hollow records
of voices, laughter, or
the way someone walks
as unique as snowflakes
but prints fade out like streaking tracers
soon only one or two aunties
remember who's who in the zoo
while great grandkids think the hairstyles look quaint
and one of us really seems to favor the guy on the right
but move on to pictures of ourselves, will ya!?
not knowing that it was a good day in that shot
or if war was over, weather hot
but time exposes our brief latent images,
f-stop for all in our pin-hole lives
love, hate, joy, grief parallax'd into flashbulb shadows
and afterimages fade
carbon arc'd
onto dusty shelves
carelessly aperture stopped
into old shoebox albums
and broken frames...
Categories:
tracers, memory,
Form: Free verse
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 same
Two armies fighting each other
In this massive death filled game?
Tracers flying in and out
Eyes searching with all their might
Boys fighting for all they were worth
These combatants in a prize fight
The silence of the dawn has come
And bodies are all they see
Friends now gone to their graves
In this land with no boundaries
Now his time has come to leave
As he boards his homeward flight
He salutes his last salute to those
Who came not back from this fight
His mind goes back to yester years
Every now and again these days
And death comes visiting in his dreams
Of those rice fields and killing ways
He sees those eyes, he hears those cries
But there’s nothing he can do
The wall of names reach out to him
The dead, the brave, the true
Categories:
tracers, death, war, youth,
Form: Free verse
Million dollar fireworks light up
the eastern sky
leaving red tracers between broken homes
and marking the rank of ordered followers
blackened by the smoke of oil money
smoldering
and a dream deferred
in the cradle of life
Categories:
tracers, death, life, places, social,
Form: Free verse
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 of the fallen men
The miasma of war I forever inhale…
Tigers rolling through billowed flame
Firing upon burnt battlefield blindly
Retreating in terror I leave the voices
Calling as I my boots tamp by arms
Reaching for safety I couldn’t render
Brothers abandoned in the Arnhem snow
These are the ghosts of war who haunt me….
Battle’s percussion on the horizon distant
I fade through the fields upon the Rhein
Farmhouses glow a midnight path
Walking to the beat of gun fire echoes
Off the walls of a shelter a little boy sits
Unafraid of the man feeding him chocolate
In the crater of a bomb…
This flash of hope my salvation from war.
Categories:
tracers, introspection, life, loss, social,
Form: Free verse
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 shell casings fell to the ground
As the VC charged our fortified hill.
We killed so many the stench made us sick,
While we fought to live and not for a thrill.
Barbwire, bullets and clay-mores took their toll
As red and green tracers lit up the sky.
Before long I was the last GI left,
When napalm caused my enemy to fry.
Fleeing the sound of our choppers gunfire
The enemy retreated to the caves and trees.
Then I cried, "thank you " to heaven above,
As I checked out my buddies on my knees.
Somehow I managed to survive the day
Though many I've served with names I have read
Carved in the shinny black stone of The Wall
Are my comrades of war, among the dead.
Categories:
tracers, history,
Form: Rhyme
Just let me win ten grand
I could piece my life back together
And still vacation on the sand
I could hold out for a good job
Take care of my daughters like before
Maybe even fix the dent
In my mercury tracers door
I could be the best santa claus ever
(my house burnt down last x-mas eve)
A christmas they'd remember forever
A few extra grand would help acheive
During my holliday season
What will surely make me weep
If you truly can't buy happiness
Then why is misery so damn cheap
Categories:
tracers, family, father, visionary, me,
Form: I do not know?