Poetmeister …on the road to Parnassus

I read and re-read your Love Letters to your soldier boy lover, husband or ex-husband. It sounds like you two performed some Shakespeare together. Community theatre, college plays? “This is a last time face, darling./not the love soaked Nureyev eyes/I knew before your first kill.” really does hit hard. Love and pain, pining for the simplicity of the innocent, and confronted with the muzzle, the chaos, the hardness of spirit that our soldiers are immersed in and twisted into. I wrote some soldier’s poems back in the 60’s when Southeast Asia was America’s playground.

HOME OF THE BRAVE

Ferns and creepers rustled softly
as a crisp breeze gently tousled
the hair of the hanging man.

Below,
in the mud,
a soldier in a foxhole
peered over the lip
and there in the moonlight
was a man on a cross
naked.

The crucified one hung there
in silent agony;
another man on a cross
seekingdown a road of sorrow
in a world of pain;
red pain,
sunset orange, yellow, and deep red.

Rusty railroad spikes in his hands,
the flesh split,
yet
he would not let loose
of life;
though it raced ahead of him
in the darkness.

The soldier had watched
for several days,
but dared not
cross to the other,
over a hundred lethal yards
of barren ground
to the death that crouched there
with the Mongols
that also waited.

Until
the silence was sliced open
with a burst of M-16 rifle fire,
and the thing on the cross
no longer quite a man,
was slashed to ribbons;
the lead searing through
his loin and chest.

The last flicker of life
rushed from him,
red-washing his limbs
and the greasy wood.

The man in the trench
felt himself tremble,
felt the tears on his dirty cheek,
as he heard the blood birds shriek
and the night became full
of their flapping.

Glenn Buttkus 1968

HEROE’S HAVEN

By the bus load
they rolled into Balboa,
wounded,
disemboweled,
their asses shot off,
carried roughly on taunt khaki stretchers.

Weary eyes
that wore a planet’s pain;
their heads shaved,
their underwear stenciled,
their blood spilling in little puddles
in quiet green hallways.

Cripples all,
they limped and wheeled,
hobbled and crept
through all of the limbs
of the gray octopus
military hospital;
within wire fences,
beneath post card palms,
gathering up gobs
of their old selves.

Metal and plastic and airplane glue
became tendons.
Canes, crutches, and chrome prosthetics
became new legs.
Empty pinned shirt sleeves
caught the ocean breeze
like sad May pole streamers,
flapping
a melancholy tune.

There were white jagged scars
running over the bodies of menl
ike angry dead veins,
hard to hide,
especially
those inside.

The doctors, nurses, and corpsmen
raged through the sterile wards,
and their insane anger was leveled
like a loaded rifle
at the patients.

For Christ’s sake,
the patients;
that dull thick red river of broken men;
damn goldbrick sonofabitches.
Make sure that those lazy bastards
shined their shoes,
and cut all their hair,
just scrape their heads bald;
filthy germ-ridden hair.
Geld them,
stab them,
break and slice them;
deny them comfort,
harass them,
give them pain
and then give them aspirin,
only aspirin.

They must get their minds right.
Shake them from their fitful slumber,
and stand them at attention.
They are just meat,
just
infitesimal maimed expendable insignificant protoplasmal service numbers,
and they are not useful
when bedridden.
Those slackers must not stay.
They must go back,
back to the front…
they must.

The men and boys of pain
absorbed the anger,
heard the words,
suffered the scapel,
took the aspirin,
shined their boots,
cut and recut their hair,
stood at rigid attention,
and they did not
forget.

Glenn Buttkus 1968

DAY OF THE PARIAH

Bogie and the Duke
never made a war movie together,
and that’s a damned shame;
it would have been
a proper piece of propaganda.

War
is always so clean
on the silver screen.
Explosions are intense rainbows,
tramping troops start toes tapping.
Great machines of war on wheels
and tracks of steel,
groan and roll,
clang and bang,
crushing foreign soil
and foreign devils beneath them.

Actors in pancake make-up,
carrying toy guns,
recite bellicose bullshit,
wearing the masks of heroes,
and the blood
on their hands and faces
is merely strawberry jam.

But the problem is,
in those darkened theatres
battalions of boys believed
in the ersatz brutality,
and found themselves
in Viet Nam.

The Freedom Birds,
screaming jet liners,
took them there,
and for those who survived
Tour 365,
and remained somewhat
alive,
brought them home again,
with the steaming blood
of the Orient
still clinging to their swollen lips.

Home,
to work in their Dad’s
hardware store, lumber yard or machine shop,
with the stench of the ‘Nam
still strong in their nostrils.

They remembered
how proud their fathers had been
sending them off to war;
and how,
now,
their only embrace
was stone silence.

Warriors walking
the streets
of every city in America,
hundreds of thousands of them,
with their fists clenched
and their minds still scrambled
from that Soc Trang overload.

Watching
and waiting,
year after year,
angry
clear into their bones,
with society’s spittle
dripping
down the front of their dress uniforms.

There it is.

There were no parades,
no handshakes,
no welcome home dinners,
no easy bank loans,
no talk of valor.

The calloused fact is
pain can only be withheld
for so long.

War creates warriors,
and not all of them
are willing to lay down
their weapons.

Glenn Buttkus 1979

Shock and awe
assaults our many senses,
like a cat does with a snake,
shaking it
until it snaps its head off;
and yet
even in the terrible death throes
of that reptile,
and the keen killer’s instinct
of that feline,
I find poetry.

Glenn Buttkus (1944-)

ON PATROL

You snake along
on your belly in the black soil
with fire ants chewing
the fungus on your feet,
the jungle flora jingling near your nose
becomes
mirage mammeries,
tipped with swollen pink nipples,
filling your mouth
with fern sweetness.

You ford the warm stream hoping
it won’t be squirming
with savage fish,
or lousy with leeches.

You try to disregard the green-eyed
beasts of the night,
whose every movement
strokes the hard fear-lump
in your colon,
and dampens the steel wool
in your throat.

Your eyes are clear,
hawk-like,
but they see nothing
in the tropical ink.
Your nostrils are flaring
full of the acrid midnight mist
hanging in the humid canopy
that hides the moon and the stars,
leaving every tree pregnant
with the possibility
of snipers.

This is recon,
and you know that you cannot afford
to fire your weapon.
No sweat,
just remember your indocrinations;
hate the Asian today
and be his friend tomorrow,
when he thinks as you do,
or says he does.
But on this day
kill him
before he kills you,
as he has been ordered to do.

Hell,
a man dies easily.
He is one of the easiest animals there is
to kill.
He has no claws, and his teeth are dull;
just a flash of steel
or a well-placed fist or thumb,
and he is dead meat.

Goddamn,
he
is in front of you,
also on patrol,
crouched in a steaming bush
with his back to you,
and the moonlight barely illuminating
his NVA uniform;
that fucking stupid pith helmet,
those deep red insignias,
and that awesome AK47.

You gently set your M16 aside,
and your assault knife
slides lethal
out of its khaki scabbord.
When you are close enough
to smell his armpits
the gook hears you;
but his lethargic response will cost him
dearly.

You leap upon the smaller man
and he manages to say
” Dinky-dau,”
before your hand covers his mouth.

You are a heartbeat slower
than you should have been,
and your advesary will not submit
without a struggle.

So you roll in the elephant grass
together,
arms and legs wrapped around each other
like lovers;
his muffled cries becoming frenzied
as your naked blade
rips his flesh
and tears his bones.

Then both of you are on your knees,
facing each other,
and for the briefest of moments
you are able to look deep
into the painful bulging eyes
of the country
you have come to conquor.

Sweet death finally comes
for your yellow opponent;
and his desperate grip relaxes
on the thick muscles of your forearms,
and his bare head rests
against your swelling chest
like a tired child.

You let go of him,
and his limp body collapses
beneath you,
lying like something broken.
He is dead,
and so is a tiny part of you
for killing him.

Your strong heart pounds as you blow
spit-bubbles in the blood
that covers your hot sweaty face.

You pick up a scrap of paper
that must of been in his dead fist.
It was the lyrics to
” California Dreamin’”
in English.
Stuffing the paper into your pocket
you crawl off like a snake.

Yes,
dinky-dau.
It’s all fucking crazy.

Glenn Buttkus 1968

But enough about me. Let’s look at the lines of RETURN TO SENDER #1.
“love missles received/aimed straight for my heart.”–what a lovely way to describe your soldier’s love letters, and how it tugged on my tears to read,”your letters stopped coming/too soon.”
That and the travail we all suffer;”watching the news is unbearable/when all I think of is losing/you”. The line,”like roses clenched in my fist,” conjures several forms of textured and emotional responses.
Since both RETURNS TO SENDER were post-dated 1968, perhaps we are referring to the same conflict. Did you lose your husband, your love in the quagmire of Viet Nam?

Glenn