No Time For Treatment

B.’s flaming heart turned cold when he saw the churning ground,
the broken spines of falling trees and crashing limbs,
the arcing, sparking power lines in the street.

His tires blown, his axle broken,
he staggered to the ground and lost a shoe.
Baghdad was on fire and his house was burning down

He plunged his arms into the skeletal remains
and retrieved his coat, the uniform coat of soldiers
the uniform worn by his enemies.

It was still morning when he heard the air-raid sirens
and sliced his hands with jagged shards of broken glass.
He swallowed the sugar on his tongue and went on.

His peripheral vision was clouded, his cheeks were bleeding
and creditors were beating at his breast for his purse,
but there was no time for treatment.

A word of explanation....
A friend of mine recently commented after reading one of these poems that although he liked the poem, he was " too honest to pretend" that he understood what it meant. That's okay.  Influenced by the Dada and Surrealist movements I write these poems by taking random bits of sentences in the books that I am reading, the songs I hear on the radio or that are running through my mind and other bits of flotsam and jetsam and putting them together in a new and strange way.  

In this particular example you might (or might not) recognize bits of the Left Behind series, and the music of The Talking Heads and the musical Godspell.   

And an Update





I decided to record a pseudo-folk /rock version of my writing.  I'm just getting over a pretty severe cold so my voice sounds.... well you can hear it.  But it sorta' makes me sound like Conner Oberst, no?