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War Poems: Over There is a gut-punching journey into the soul of a solider with striking imagery relating war experiences in Iraq and the latter acclamation to civilian life. It is a collection of deep and honest thoughts on war and its aftermath without glamour or flag-waving. Regret, suicide, love, lost, naivete, destruction, are deeply woven within the candid poetry of Over There. If you have ever wanted to feel and discover what Veterans face both in the great of battle and in the silence of suffering, Over There will open your heart.

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War Poems

Streets

Anxiety starts to build into a roar.
Sweat glistens restless palms.
“What the hell am I doing?”
Escapes from the lips of a reserved man.
Delusions cease to confound confusions,
As passerbys are glued to screens with high resolutions,
And is it clear,
That I don’t know what I’m doing here.
Rising frost from my breath,
Jumps from a rising chest,
And frigid sleeping fingers,
Awakens like a discovered crest,
I fumble between heighten senses of elevations,
When spasmodic noises amplifies my frustrations,
And is it clear,
I don’t know what I’m doing here.
Congested roads slick with reflections,
Paints a man wandering and broken,
Grappling a pleading proclamation,
Besieging patrons for oil rubbed tokens,
His pleading eyes go unspoken,
And still,
I don’t know what I’m doing here.
Lost in a warm armor of drunken rage,
Shifting through bouts of confession and railing subterfuge,
I light a match and burn off these days,
Between splendor and despair,
Between darkness and light,
Between fury and flight,
I stumble along the path of fate:
Belligerent and sputtering.

Vestiges

Through jeep trails,
And mountain ranges,
Littered with the ore of miner’s ambitions,
I seek a place:
A piece of Earth not scorched by the obsessiveness of hate,
But a calm that drips full of honey,
And brims sweetly of nectar whose bite is tender and subduing,
I sleep during the summer noons,
On logs wiser than I;
Sap glues the sweat of a hundred men to the same condition:
The condition of escape and wonder,
Of redemption,
Of past glories memorialized over sagging guts and wobbled knees,
And the revelation that a satisfying brew surrounded by souls isn’t a time machine.

Now the moon has come out to play,
I sit swayed by the taunting breeze,
As mud hugs my shabby and assaulting boots , I think:
I want to create beautiful things,
Precious and delicate,
Breathing and contorting,
Inspired and reverting.

XO

First Love

The Foxhole

God does not live,
In the worn stained carpet of churches,
Or in the deceiving tongues of serpents,
But in foxholes mired with subtle cries
Of green fledgling lives.
And still is the wind that carries the want of a mother’s embrace;
A face implanted in the bosom of chance and pace.

In search of military Veteran writers and artists

I’m looking for Veterans who write poems/short stories to include in the hardcover version of War Poems. Works should range from gripping experiences overseas to the realities of returning home. Artists are welcomed.

If interested contact me below

You Said

You said you’d wait for him,
And wait for him you did.
Until the man you waited for cease to live.
He came back with the same eyes that won your soul,
But those eyes held no soul.
And you wonder if he’ll look at you the same as he did before,
If he was the same man who told you you were beautiful the year before,
Beneath a night sky,
Fuming with passion and abandoned,
Embraced in a farewell entrapped by a kiss that would nourish the dry spell.
You danced in a bar filled with breaking hearts,
Before a morning of tearful departs.
You listed all the things he liked,
His favorite sports team,
His car magazines,
The way his scent lingered on pillow cases.
A tribute to the man you knew before
Tremblings and temptations,
Defaced promise and youth.
A year of sacrifice has become unglued,
By rogue expectations and delegations that bury the truth,
That you can’t love what you can’t refuse.
And time is a leaving train,
Fixed on a destination,
Not deterred by our own lateness,
As we run to catch steaming metal,
And medal in contemptment,
Won by a dream derailed from the clutches of commitment.
But you said,
You said.

Call of Duty

We will not be written in books,
As names,
But numbers.
We will fade into the dust of time,
Our sweat dried from the escaping cracks
Of ground.
And we will carry whatever remnants
We have left,
In the coffers,
Brazen with smiles behind broken lives.
We hide in the early hours of the night,
Our faces enamoured with killing objects
on digial screens.
Yelling into a microphone “fuck you dude!”
Bitter between championed teams.
Mountain Dew fuels aggression and suppression of innocence stolen.
Chips are crisp with salt and plucked from fingers that pulled triggers.
Memories blare like trumpets inside lucid dreams,
And a drink soothes the nerves of a dream deterred,
Or so we heard.

We pray that light will shine,
Maybe for a few precious moments our minds drift off into a bliss of calm and contentment.
If we are mindful maybe our resentments will transform into forgiveness.
And addiction doesn’t run rampant,
Unchained in a field riddled with avoidance,
Transported to console the suffering.

Still in the lonely hours we needle every thread that quilts us to a time,
Where heroes dined on succulent dishes of mission.
Now we are confined to living our former lives through pictures,
Depicting a time where life and death were a line shorter than this sentence.

The Click

The sharp touch of metal,
Caresses my fist,
As the light,
Devours a lonely glimpse,
Of what life has become,
For the boy,
Who left the shielding arms,
Of Apple pie and Monday night football,
To save a world from evil,
Without a uniform or flag.
As the faucet drips,
The tune of the forgotten,
Is lulled to sleep,
By the lullaby of the safety.
Click, click, click,
Is the rhythm of thought,
That dances between,
The present,
And forever.