by Stan Pisle
On Sunday mornings,
George Stephanopoulos does:
“The soldiers in memoriam”
I study the names,
attending to the towns they are from.
Hoping most are from cities.
--Big ones.
Because,
by convention of opinion,
a dead soldier from a city,
is less crippling.
--Really,
the denominator of the whole is bigger,
they can pass in vagueness of the divisor.
The city won’t know who the soldier fucked.
Only,
That, at this time,
a soldier has been fucked.
And the progeny of that fucking is an urn,
spilling ashes across a newspaper.
--Ashes to be bushed aside from formal blues,
As the city’s coughs during the tapping march of
earning,
buying,
and capital myth worship.
But urn dust burns a uniform away
from a small town soldier.
It chokes everyone’s lungs,
stopping the whole fraction,
to catch breath,
in a parade,
to distract from our chronic asthma.
Berkeley resident Stan Pisle's poems have appeared in previously in The New Verse News and Our Magazine of Cleveland, Ohio. He's a supporter of California State University East Bay's writing program, and an advisory board member of CSUEB's literary magazine Arroyo.
__________________________________________________
