Paramnesia

 
There was no war.
We did not kill.
Our tanks did not tear up
their rice fields.
He did not bleed out
in spite of my efforts.
It never happened.
Old men sat in front
of their hooches,
rolled a cigarette
and watched the light
move across the paddy.
A child rode
the water buffalo home
tapping its flank with a stick.
Farmers stopped in their fields,
leaned on hoes and sang ca dao.
There were no layers of dead
below the earth, Vietnamese,
Chinese, French, American.
No tiger cages on Con Son Island.
None of this ever happened.
Instead we all swam
in the warm salt sea
offshore near Kim Son Mountain,
the waves green, backlit by the sun.

*

And it came to pass that people gave each other poems each night, a flame cupped in the hands and passed from one to another in the hard wind of our times.

*

This Day

 
Word made flesh is not just
THE WORD made flesh
but any word at all:
coffee, piss, pill and plum,
and how I babble to myself,
alone this morning, the soliloquy
my social life, my conversation.
I’m told we live longer
when partnered, when there’s
a heartbeat to match our own.
Alone, this is the way my life
falls out this thirty-first day
of March, two thousand
twenty-five. That being so
I want words to take up the space
in my life, to grow large in the room
along with this coffee cup
computer screen, blood pressure cuff.
Each word a space to wander in:
the architecture of say, Love.
I’ve lived long enough
to watch my country begin
to fail like all others,
its people asleep through
the time of tyrants rising,
and now teetering on the edge
of Hell. I’d just as soon
be younger, to throw a fast fist
at the juggernaut of stupidity,
to run from the cloud
of closing tear gas.
But I’ll just stroll into it
as if walking the dog I do not own.
Sun, I say. Wind, I say.
I say, mother of pearl cloud.
These things I love, the farmland
that spreads out all around me,
the cows indifferent to
the scheming and grasping.
One more day.
Sing it, one more day.

***

(Featured image from Pexels)