by Louis Giron

When Charlie and Nguyen visited,
the air stung the eyes and smelled of cordite;
flares floated down, swinging in parachutes
like children’s toys at a party;
rifle fire chattered like hyped-up crickets;
fear was a tin sheet O.D. green, one each, Army issue,
shaken in the air, crackling in the night.

Each sunset on the firebase in the DMZ
was the most beautiful
I had yet seen.

Many of us drank, others prayed,
some smoked crack or did downers
to put ourselves where we would be
and to put ourselves where we were not,
and to be what we were not.

Others of us were not enough there
to count; like the hollow walls,
courtesy of the shit-for-brains Marines that built them,
that were supposed to protect us.

Because of hollow walls,
I learned to make love to the dirt;
learned to smoke fear, to shoot
it up, and became hooked on its rush,
as I could not have done before,
before the mortars walked towards us
before Eine Kleine Nachtmusik NVA-transcription,
before Charlie and Nguyen visited.

Behind these hollow walls,
some came to know,
Socrates, I would eat thy liver in the Plaka
some to revel, others to shame
Comfort me with claymores and stay me with tracers…
that they were other than they thought they were
for I am sick with the love of this rush
and less than they would have themselves be.
And Joshua chose those who lapped the water directly from the river.

Closer than our deaths,
closer than we could imagine,
closer than a blast wall away
closer than we would know,

and nearer than the next satchel charge,
much nearer than we wanted to know,
like the tunnels undetected
beneath and around our walls,

closer than the dying in the tunnels,
nearer than Charlie and Nguyen
lying dead and undiscovered in the tunnel
next to our bunker,

truth clawed at us
from beneath and from within our walls,
our hollow walls,

a bloody-mouthed killer-reptile,
whose brain was hunger,
whose life was another’s death,