Tanks

I spent a good chunk

of my thirties building

plastic model tanks.

Shermans, Tigers, Panthers

American, German, Russian.

Named for generals and cats.

Put them in meticulously

created fictitious scenes

as if the Cold War 

in which I’d served

and then rejected

had turned hot.

Juggling and struggling

with God and Revolution

at 1/35 scale; a scale

I tried to handle on my desktop.

A Patton M60A1E

crashing through a Safeway.

A French howitzer embedded

in the ruins of a McDonalds.

I wasn’t hungry for aggression,

the scenes weren’t always bleak.

I recreated a photograph I saw

of a young man playing a clarinet

next to a burned out

Sherman tank in Managua.

An imaginary picnic in

the ruins of the no man’s land

between East and West Berlin

inspired by the Christmas Truce of 1914,

when German and English soldiers

crawled out of the trenches,

kicked around a football,

shared cigarettes

and Christmas songs.

Before the chlorine

and mustard gas attacks,

the vanities of commanders,

and the storm of steel

and TNT resumed.

The last diorama I built

had multifold hands I crafted

from plastic Chinese backscratchers

bursting through the muddy soil

as if the Earth herself

was reaching up to drag a tank

down into her molten center.

The earth in my basement

had the final word; all my

dioramas corrupted by the

damp and moldy soil.

the window

the dried bodies of hundreds

of black flies lay on the sill

beneath the window pane

where they’d vainly tried

to reach the garden outside,

buzzing weakly until they died.

no one had been in the house

since sometime around the time

when families gathered in front

of the color set on sunday nights

to watch disney and bonanza.

the sunbeam in the dust rising

in the air looked like a ray 

emanating from the hand of god.

through the grime-speckled window,

falling on a broken ladies’ mirror

lying on the floor and sending

a sparkling reflection to dance

each afternoon on the ceiling,

like tinkerbelle touching the castle

with her wand or the fire

burning through the map.

tsugasvsdi: smoke

Jerry left his sleeping bag,

the one with a broken zipper,

underneath the clover leaf

freeway interchange.

Trudged up to the Kwik Serv

to get a bag of peanuts

and a pack of smokes.

paper sign taped to

the left hand door

arrow pointing right

“use other door”.

The clerk behind the

plexiglass at the counter

said, you need to put on

a mask, sir.

Jerry says, I don’t

have any of that.

walks out side.

using the correct door.

digs through his

duct-taped knapsack

looking for a scrap

of something he can

use to cover his mouth

and nose. it’s important

now to take care of others

and he really needs a smoke.

I was looking for turtles

A swarm of garter snakes

charged blindly through a school

of minnows trapped in a shrunken pool

swinging their open mouths

from side to side until they

caught the helpless fish.

Two snakes grabbed

the same fish and began

to swallow it, one from the head

and one from the tail until

they met each other

snout to snout.

A tug of war ensued,

without give or quarter.

A snake’s teeth make it difficult

to back off what they begin to swallow.

Would one snake have to eat

the other if neither refused to yield?

This way and that way

they struggled, each determined

to prevail. In an instant, one gaped

wide releasing the minnow,

shot back across the sand to the pool

to try for another. Undoubtably successful.