A Vulnerable World

Have you ever died general?  
Do you know the intense sting before death  
—a bullet penetrating your chest as fluidly as a river breaking into your meaty dam?  
Better yet lets call it salt water  
because blood is always mixed with sweat and tears before death—  
the effort in hanging on,  
the memories of the ones you love.  
“No.”  
Have you ever known a soldier to die that you didn’t want back?  
“No,” he says.  
   
Atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs—a blasphemy to the tiny building blocks of life!  
How is it that what gives life destroys it?  
Hiroshima, Nagasaki.  
So we will never use those infernal weapons again,  
but we will keep our grips on them  
to be the last things of day that we toss into night ‘s imminent shadow.  
   
A child’s head is severed savagely from its puny body and sometimes metaphorically  
when he can never dream because a flower can’t grow  
in the desert  
unless it’s a thorny cactus    
that is very hard to love.  
   
Military drafts are marked unconstitutional, but they are still registered for  
like the retainment of nuclear bombs  
that rent the world and lead it to sorrows  
just by imaging them.  
   
War tanks, military banks—  
the world is always in crisis.  
Everyday someone is being killed  
with your tax dollars.  
   
Stripping away the fashion of today  
and replacing it with my own,  
there is a world with no weapons,  
and the men do battle with their fists.  
Punches and punches, kicks and kicks, and suddenly we’re out of breath.  
The high range rifles and missiles and bombs distance us from  
the full experience  
of the fruitlesness of war.  
   
Tired men  
duking it out on a sunny field  
fall to the ground to squeeze refreshing water out of the grass.  
Countries send their fighters  
of the best ranked boxers and most ruthless wrestlers,  
and they are not quickly tossed into the hungry nocturnal pit of oblivion.  
Fight with your two hands  
and you’ll see very quickly  
that this is what war is and what it has always been—  
no end in sight.  
A sea of men,  
and you fight against the waves with your arms and legs,  
and the tide carries you far beyond the edge of death
which is opening your swollen eyes which are pierced by the lightning spears of the sun
and realizing that you're still on earth to suffer more brutal injury and disfigurement.  
Your body is drowned in the blood of other men,  
and these men are beat harder until their adversaries’fists are tired.  
They collapse on top of you.
Then, their adversaries are conquered by other men
with great thud that can be heard and felt surging from above you--
above the pounds of human flesh that buries your own.    
   
All the while, in a war of fists and the must of pure human spirit,  
the warriors have time to consume their pain  
and, because death is not quick and murder is not efficient,    
time to drink the sense of their situation  
and reason.  
It’s getting nowhere.  
It’s meaningless.  
“So war is and has always been,”  
they quickly note  
though our technological advances cause damage to our humanity  
and stunt the productivity of the mirror-neuron system  
that is the source of empathy.  
A global cease-fire is called in that world, a treaty of peace.  
Thus the end of war  
because when all men are helpless and vulnerable    
to another man’s fearful persistence,  
it is learned  
that the mother strength that will claim dominion over all  
is the strength of intellect and a calm mind.