by Stephen Maurer
Next door, our neighbor, a war veteran,
lived alone in a small home,
upstairs light on all night,
flags unfurled year-round.
After his funeral
in lowered voices, we talked about
everyday at 8am, he locked up,
his sleight limp metered him
along a set sequence of streets,
baggy combat fatigues on a spindly frame.
Pausing at the overgrown bushes,
he checked each house,
drawing on a cigarette,
a far-away look in watery eyes.
Unsmiling in sunny weather,
he leaned through wind and rain,
stopped only by a siren's blare
or an engine's backfire.
Cars slowed to respect his route.
Neighborhood dogs never barked
as he marched by.
He didn't mention war, even when asked.
Some saw an American patriot
who had safeguarded the country;
others, a tragic PTSD victim
of the "military-industrial complex".
Each thought they knew him
by what they saw and what they didn't.
We all noticed when he missed that last day.
I was first to hear the shot.
I found him slumped over his kitchen table,
the wall splattered with bone and brain,
the back of his head gone,
a hollow-point .44 slug his last meal.
A blood-splattered note next to his plate
read, "there's no brotherhood, no
more enemies to stand against
only has-beens, ghosts--nothing's left"
No one remembered him smile,
but I did, once, in his backyard
seeing his cat stalk and kill a sparrow.
Certified in psychoanalysis by the American Psychoanalytic Association, Stephen Maurer has practiced and written about psychoanalysis for over 20 years, most recently from a Lacanian perspective. His poems have appeared in Boston Lit. Magazine, Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine, Tiger's Eye, Darkling, Blueprint Review, Desert Voices, Switchback and Deronda Review. His first chapbook, Side-Effects; Poems of Remedy and Doubt, from Big Table Press, appeared this Fall.
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