Getting Away

This poem follows another poem I found to use as a prompt. It is not descriptive of that poem nor is it of my life. This poem is descriptive of how my imagination can go weird. It is, in short, a fiction through and through. I have no lumps nor bird traps.

The last time I crawled under barbed wire was in basic training. At that time they advised us that the machine gun fire overhead as we crawled along was live fire and that we should not stand up. I didn't know if they were lying but I sure know I kept my body flat. Live fire sounds different from in front of it. That was fifty years ago this last summer.

It was only a few weeks later I caught a severe meningitis and nearly died. I was not yet nineteen. I spent the month of August in the military hospital at Fort Ord, California.

Getting Away

You are the stone lump
beneath my bones, my dry skin
cracking in the cold.
I hold your bird trap.
The empty shiny talon
of it glints moonlight
while I hunker down
like a chipped wash pan that's dropped
on hard clattering
ground. The thin gravel
bites my unshod feet, dribbles
past my frayed collar
as I grate forward
under the low hung barbed wire
that cuts at my soul.

‎October ‎13, ‎2014 3:18 PM