slight confessional
Don’t you recall the cab ride with the Marine home on leave and he was quivering lips and strained voice as he recoiled the twenty-five years he spent bending knees green to balance his sniper rifle, and you handed him a twenty and thanked him for his service, his dread. When we met, you swore to the army, some blue-collared dream, a vision lost in the eastern foliage, a nightmare abandoned when the cops brought you home, hands bound loosely.
If war is a soldier half-weeping at traffic lights and stepping hard on the gas pedal like it’s a hand grenade and if security is shaking your head when everyone else is nodding asleep, sleeping with your eyes open and a knife under your pillow, holding keys dagger-like when you reach the front door in darkness, then rebellion must be holding the square face of a Catholic, slipping him into the Wailing Wall with a note reading this is how we go—this, I fear, must be how we go.