deepundergroundpoetry.com

Quinctilius Varus: Give Me Back My Legions

My heroes have always been devils,
Milton’s Lucifer, John’s Apollyon;
The convict in Wilde’s Goal
The one who let his rage have its way.  
 
Not heroes  
Please...
But devils, assassins
 
And when I was a kid
They were crawling around in the weeds  
Cradling M16s
Sometimes drawing down on their neighbors  
With a broomstick  
From their bedroom windows  
When they were home on leave
 
The rockets red glare
Body parts in the air
Whatever, whatever
 
I knew one,
He drove a utility van  
In South LA
A devil
Some asshole shoved a 45 through his window
One day
 
He jammed his hand into the door jamb
And slammed him into a telephone pole
Boom
That was a fail
 
One asshole in the gutter
And a stone cold killer driving away
With a drop gun for his trouble
 
Dale was a door gunner
Isaac, a tunnel rat
Another came home with a bag of grenades
 
Used to blow em off
Up in the desert
Above LA
 
Vietnam: Vietnam
I don’t know what this is today
Or what we think were trying to save
 
As if that was ever a thing
The men I knew just wanted to stay alive
And they’d set the world on fire to survive  
 
Napalm, Anthrax, Plutonium
There was this Indian lookin fucker
He was big
Told me he was going to kill me one time
If I didn’t cool my shit  
 
I was eighteen  
And he meant it
I modified my behavior accordingly  
 
He’d say, “listen asshole,
You have to take care of number one
Earth is a ghetto  
And all that matters is who has the gun.”
 
And as they die off
We’re drinking antifreeze  
Hoping we’ll never see
The ice cold loneliness of outer space
In a dead mans eyes.
 
 
Written by crystalcolumz (-Shannon-)
Published | Edited 24th Dec 2021
Author's Note
Devils
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