Lunar Knot (1965 Vietnam War Draft)

Dreary moon, must you look down upon me so coldly? Your ever presence

follow with contempt barely disguised. This lowly form bowed before you, looks for grace in

the heaven’s too high. Forgiveness is what I need, yet: do I deserve? I have done nothing to

earn such a virtue. Will the Fate’s caress sallow cheeks and grant clemency? In mind’s

eye, I see the ground is viscous. Meadows sweet fragrance, fill me with the comfort to stop

my beating heart. I ran with hasty terror from duty, family, protect; protect whom? I will kill,

kill, kill and eat those dead burnt bodies. No! Tell me, mere reflection of sun’s fire, you must

understand my miserable countenance. Nocturnal nostalgia, take me back to solar eclipse,

when my world fell like leaves and I was conscripted. Bold prints and shaking palms, it

overestimates.  

Whims and lilting children’s song filters through my life like the changing seasons. A

note so sweet should have gave warning to the devil’s chord hiding on records aberrational

motion. Encompassed in familial indifference and placed upon a critical pedestal, I took

seditious solace in Big Boys’ delicious aroma and symphony of life and laughter. A feast of

thanks has barren joys as they pontificate their rank given by my objectionable favor. War’s

insatiable hunger for selfless sacrifice, cruelty, blood, and death sickens. It conjures up

gunpowder, aerial bombs and keening screams. To serve and protect thy country is a

worthy endeavor. Protest thy station for fear hath settled in thy limbs. Wars music is the

beginning notes of my Funeral March. O ye of little faith: why do you doubt? What other

choices do I have?

On chilly nights, contemplation of evading vacant nemesis consumes. Sanity is

merely an entity in trenches too deep to reach. Garnered approval of appraisal places this

body in a livid lake. In the Law’s unnatural order, I would give away free will and call it...