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.