First They Came...

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.


by Martin Niemöller (regarding the inactivity of the German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power)

The School House

Boys crowd the iron bars
like jailbirds
in an old western

All singing the same song,
like an out of sync choir
'hey mista, hey mista
hey mista you hungry
hey mista you thirsty?'

The faces in the crowd
are cracked
the hands
stained orange

They look like
they've been eating
Cheetos made of
60-grit sandpaper

I call over the one
standing off to the side
refusing to belt out the same tune
with the rest of the chorus
his head down
his hands clean and tan

"How much?"

The tenors join in
as well as the baritones
immediately undercutting
one another

'Hey mista,
three for five,'
'no mista,
three for three'

For a third world country
they sure understand
commerce and trade —
supply and demand.

I pay the quiet one
the original price
he runs off to
fetch my order
while the others insult me
in broken English

'Get the fuck out of yourself,'
one says
while hoisting up
his middle finger

They laugh
and take turns
showing off
hand signals

Flipping birds and
throwing up gang signs
one even air-pumps
two orange fingers in the pink
and one cracked pinky in the stink

They are very proud
of the foul language
and gestures
they've learned
at this fucked up school house

The constant rotation
of young Marines
who stand guard by the
front gate of the base
always take time to play professor

Children
teaching
children

The clean boy
returns with my order
and even says
'thank you mista'
for his tip

The others
smirk at
him

Modesty is not often rewarded
on this playground

They are vulgar
because it gets attention
and attention means orders
and orders mean tips

Who needs textbooks
when you can make
more money
than your father
by saying 'fuck'
and running to grab sodas


by Mark Fayloga

--
The School House is about the ‘runners’ at Forward Operating Base Joker. At almost all of the FOBs and observation posts you can find a way to have somebody go out into town to pick you up desert groceries: soda, flatbread, rice … even chickens. Most posts out here have makeshift outdoor kitchens, so the men get together on many nights for cookouts instead of eating sodium-packed rations. But no post has a system in place quite like at FOB Joker. The base is right by a bazaar and market, so not only is there more to choose from, it’s more readily available. It’s like walking into a bank but instead of a bunch of tellers behind counters and glass windows there are a bunch of pre-adolescent boys on top of a mud wall behind iron bars all vying for your attention money. -M.F.

Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin

This jungle poem is going to be my last.

This space walk is.

Racing in a cab through springtime Central Park,

I kept my nose outside the window like a dog.

The stars above my bed at night are vast.

I think it is uncool to call young women Ms.

My darling is a platform I see stars from in the dark,

And all the dogs begin to bark.

My grunting gun brings down her charging warthog,

And she is frying on white water, clinging to a log,

And all the foam and fevers shiver.

And drink has made chopped liver of my liver!

Between my legs it's Baudelaire.

He wrote about her Central Park of hair.



I look for the minuterie as if I were in France,

In darkness, in the downstairs entrance, looking for the light.

I'm on a timer that will give me time

To see the way and up the stairs before the lights go out.

The so delicious Busby Berkeley dancers dance

A movie musical extravaganza on the staircase with me every night.

Such fun! We dance. We climb. We slip in slime.

We're squirting squeezes like a wedge of lime!

It's like a shout.

It's what minuterie is all about.

Just getting to the landing through the dark

That has been interrupted for a minute is a lark.

And she's so happy. It is grand!

I put my mobile in her ampersand.

The fireworks are a fleeting puff of sadness.

The flowers when they reach the stars are tears.

I don’t remember poems I write.

I turn around and they are gone.

I do remember poor King Richard Nixon’s madness.

Pierre Leval, we loved those years!

We knocked back shots of single malt all night.

Beer chasers gave dos caballeros double vision, second sight—

Twin putti pissing out the hotel window on the Scottish dawn.

A crocodile has fallen for a fawn.

I live flap copy for a children’s book.

He wants to lick. He wants to look.

A tiny goldfinch is his Cupid.

Love of cuntry makes men stupid.

It makes men miss Saddam Hussein!

Democracy in Baghdad makes men think

Monstrosity was not so bad.

I followed Gandhi barefoot to

Remind me there is something else till it began to rain.

The hurricane undressing of democracy in Baghdad starts to sink

The shrunken page size of the New York Times, and yet we had

A newspaper that mattered once, and that is sad,

But that was when it mattered. Do

I matter? That is true.

I don’t matter but I do. I lust for fame,

And after never finding it I never was the same.

I roared into the heavens and I soared,

And landed where I started on a flexing diving board.

I knew a beauty named Dawn Green.

I used to wake at the crack of Dawn.

I wish I were about to land on Plymouth Rock,

And had a chance to do it all again but do it right.

It was green dawn in pre-America. I mean

Great scented forests all along the shore, which now are gone.

I’ve had advantages in life and I pronounce Iraq “Irrock.”

The right schools taught me how to tock.

I’m tocking Turkey to the Kurds but with no end in sight.

These peace tocks are my last. Goodbye, Iran. Iran, good night.

They burned the undergrowth so they could see the game they hunt.

That made the forest a cathedral clear as crystal like a cunt.

Their arrows entered red meat in the glory

Streaming down from the clerestory.

Carine Rueff, I was obsessed—I was possessed! I liked your name.

I liked the fact Marie Christine Carine Rue F was Jewish.

It emphasized your elegance in Paris and in Florence.

You were so blond in Rue de l’Université!

The dazzling daughter of de Gaulle’s adviser Jacques Rueff was game

For anything. I’m lolling here in Mayfair under bluish

Clouds above a bench in Mount Street Gardens, thinking torrents.

Purdey used to make a gun for shooting elephants.

One cannot be the way one was back then today.

It went away.

I go from Claridge’s to Brands Hatch racing circuit and come back

To Claridge’s, and out and eat and drink and bed, and fade to black.

The elephants were old enough to die but were aghast.

The stars above this jungle poem are vast.

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.

Outside the windows is New York.

I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland

Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.

And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some

I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.

The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned

Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.

The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound

That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.

The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.

They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.

The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.

The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.

by Frederick Seidel

Do Not Mind the Bombs

In Belgium, I remember
they called this day White Monday. Belgium was my
home when I was learning words like God
and doubt and faith. Belgium was my home
when I entered the country called Man. There,
in that land where I’d learned to fall in love
with learning, winter always stayed and stayed,
the days too dark, the rains incessant, pounding,
pounding—and all the sleepers dreamed of sun
and shirtless days. Shirtless, shoeless days.
I remember: trains, leaves, trees. Remember
too that aging, tired woman who’d told me why
the trees grew straight and tall in rows
in Belgium’s rain-soaked earth.
I remember what she’d said: “The trees,
we planted them in rows. When the war
was finally won.” I pictured her young,
a handsome husband at her side. At last the war
was done! At last! And before they planted crops,
they planted trees—the trees the war had stolen
from the earth. “What the bombs had not destroyed,
we chopped for fuel. Their stumps and branches
gave us warmth. The land was bare and spent.
The earth, it reeked of guns and blood and rotting
flesh. And so we planted trees. And as we worked
we found reminders of the war. A rifle, empty
shells, the remains of a man, a bullet through
his chest, his uniform turning to dust. We called
the priest and blessed the bones. A boy! I knew
he’d been a boy. Belgian, English, French! Bah!
He was a boy! I cried that night for all
the world had lost—then woke and finished
planting. And through the years, we watched
the growing trees. Before my mother died, she went
from tree to tree, kissing leaves and branches.
‘Have you gone mad?’ I yelled. And she screamed
back: ‘I am, at last, in love!’ She smelled of leaves
and bark the night she breathed her last. The day I buried
her, I leaned against a tree and wept. I swear, I swear
I smelled her breath as I leaned against that tree.”
Today, I hear that woman’s voice as I
read the morning news—the news of bombs,
of all the deaths, Americans, Iraqis, children, women,
men. Dead. Like π the blood and bodies
run into infinity. I walk outside, the sky as clear
as simple boyhood words mamá, papá, y agua. Oh
for a day when this would be my only task—to sit
and memorize the blueness of a sky.
Better now to study
trees that grow on desert sands than to study war.
So I begin to count the leaves on limbs
of waking trees. I know that wars are raging
everywhere. Even in my heart. Do not mind
the bombs. Do not mind them, not today.
I wander through my yard,
examining the plants. I lost some to the freeze—but
most survived. I touch and kiss the tender leaves
and speak to them, half lost, half crazed,
and half expecting trees and plants
and shrubs to kiss me back. Perhaps, today,
they’ll kiss me back. I touch a desert bush—yellow
flowers bursting like a flame, spring’s first blaze
of light. The dog running up and down and up
and down the yard, then rolling on the grass
to scratch her back. I laugh and speak
to her. The wars are everywhere. I’ll plant
another tree. Something to survive the torture
of the sun. Something to withstand a thousand
years of drought.
I touch a tree I planted
years ago. I touch and touch. Oh, do not mind
the bombs today. Kiss me, kiss me back.


by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Requiem: The Soldier

Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together, slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.

They are speaking together of what they loved in vain here,
but the air is too thin to carry the things they say.
They were young and golden, but they came on pain here,
and their youth is age now, their gold is grey.

Yet their hearts are not changed, and they cry to one another,
'What have they done with the lives we laid aside?
Are they young with our youth, gold with our gold, my brother?
Do they smile in the face of death, because we died?

Down some cold field in a world uncharted
the young seek each other with questioning eyes.
They question each other, the young, the golden hearted,
of the world that they were robbed of in their quiet paradise


by Humbert Wolfe