(What would that soldier, captured by the Serbs, say, if he could write home to his family?)
I never knew this place could exist
back in the days when I was home and
the sunshine was a never-ending bliss
that warmed your back and kissed your throat, like a lover.
Here, time not measured by hours or minutes, but by
cigarettes, counted out into our waiting, humbled hands
by the guardthat has taken a liking born out of pity to us,
three boys much too far away from home.
It's dark here, damp, musty too.
I think they've got us underground
the same level as that
Albanian girl I saw whose body was thrown into a makeshift grave and
her bones are probably three feet left of my ear when I sleep at night
If you can call it sleep.
When I wake up in the morning, my head is still throbbing
with the sound of the guns that shouted all through the night.
I'm dreaming of California palm trees and ocean waves
to soothe my eyes that have been rubbed raw by the sight of
these foreign hills, this barren land,
the naked corpses.
"Join the navy and see the world"
but we've joined the army and seen hell itself
and I won't win any medals for telling you that I'm scared to death.
I never knew that people could turn on each other
with the savagery of crazed dogs
with no regard for age, youth, beauty.
And as I write these words to you, a hundred times over in my mind
because that guard can't give me any pen or paper
and he won't risk his job or his life
to put this in the mail for me I can see them scatter in the wind, like so many ashes
that fall from my cigarette tip
and fail to ever set the world on fire.