The Daily {W}rite Novmber wk o2

Wednesday,

I need to get out, make new friends to replace the ones I just 86ed from my personal life. Yeah, I know. I'll make some new friends, laugh with them, hang with them a while and then . . . BLAM! all that devoted friendship will explode into another volley of emotional shrapnel. And I'll fall back into my dark apartment lock the door, disconnect the phone and just crawl up onto the couch and  . . . watch TV for a month, two months, three . . . maybe six. Now and then I'll peek between the Venetian blinds every now and then . . . just making sure the world hasn't disappeared  while I wasn't looking. Maybe I shouldn't even bother. Maybe I'm suppose to be without friends. I wouldn't be the first or the last man to ever find himself totally alone  . . . nothing but the quiet reflection of my  memories for company.

Life is Short

I don't know if I have a soul

but if I do I think it sleeps so deep
inside my head and heart
that nothing can awake it.

I wonder too about heaven

and hell and night and day,
I wonder as I wander free
to think about such silly things.

My neighbors tell me

life is short too short to dally,
too meaningful to take for granted
too precious to waste.

I believe them when they say such things

even though I know (I think I know) that life,
this little life is but a blink, and I am nothing
but a wink away from being freed of it.

Woodie o7-14-17 (rewrites 11-o8-17)

Thursday, November 1o, 2o17 11pm
A poem from a collection of short poems I'm actively working on right now. Well, okay, NOT right now but I'm working on them.

Beyond sight, beyond the fragile veil 

where thought haunts consciousness.

That's where my Self lives, forever 

perplexed by its own existence.

One day a child, the next an old man

who can barely remember his own name.

Asphalt roads, the wooded trail

where autumn leaves go to die

at the hands of solemn crows,

the memories gather 'round

an empty grave so dark, so black

the bottom can't be seen,

that's where I live most days, these days. 

Staring at the reflection

hovering in the window glass,

trying desperately to remember

what the hell I look like.

Woodie 11-1o-17

Friday, November 1o, 2017  11:58pm

Today is the Marine Corps birthday, 242 years old. Chesty Puller the most decorated Marine in the corps once said, "You're not really a Marine until you spend time in the brig." Yes, for all its Semper-fi attitude at the heart of every Marine is a deep seated desire to say FUCK YOU! to everybody including (and especially) anybody that was NOT

an enlisted man. Chesty was also THE MARINE because he entered the Corps as a private and left it as a fuckin' Lieutenant General! Yeah, Chesty was the man of men!

1968. I was getting short. No more than maybe three months before I would be headed stateside. One of the grunts doing pot shack duty showed me a picture in the Stars & Stripes of some very, very old dude with this young, wide-eye kid. "That's Chesty Puller!" the grunt said with the exuberance usually reserved for that poster of Brigitte Bardot sitting on a Harley. "Which one?" "The old guy, dude! The young guy's his son. He just enlisted in the Corps and is here in Vietnam!" Yep, that's what the article said, sure enough. I went back to the picture and wondered at it. Chesty, my main man, the Marine Corps' green god was beyond old. There's a saying that someone looks like, "death warmed over." But this old dude was beyond that. I'm not even sure he was alive, just a shriveled up piece of dead meat that someone put a suit on and propped up for a party pic. And the kid next to him, his son, that wide-eye look in his eyes wasn't from wonder; it was fear. Straight up fear. And he should be afraid. I mean, do you want to be in a war zone where everybody knows Chesty Puller is your dad? Not everybody liked Chesty Puller. He was a general. Yeah, he made his way through the rants to get to general  . . . but people don't give a shit about that. You give up your right's as a human being when you become an officer. And at the time "fraggin'" an officer was a fad. A guys resting in his tent, and he hears something rolling on the floor, looks down and Pop! No more officer. One guy with a grudge against Chesty, one hand grenade tossed into his hooch and young Captain Puller would be no more. But that didn't happen to Lewis Burwell Puller Jr. Something more horrible was waiting for him.