DEATH Poem: Left Alone, by Bill Hicks

We boarded the 727 as
individuals, not as
units or platoons.
We flew shoulder-to-shoulder,
the dirty-faced dogs of war, and
everyday civilians who
didn’t know what we had
seen, or done, or felt inside.
The day before, we
encountered a little gook
kid, not more than 10 or 11,
wearing black pajamas and holding
an AK. He raised it
and the last thing he ever saw on
the Earth was a
muzzle flash.
M16 rounds are not made to wound men,
but to kill them deader than dead,
so imagine the horror when the rip
the soul out of a child and scatter it
on the ground like entrails of a lamb
thrown to a pack of wolves.
Did his mother mourn?
Was she even alive herself to do so?
How could we ever know?
What were we to do?
We left on planes, sprinkled into
the wind like
the ashy remains of a loved one,
each to our own corner.
I disembarked in Ohio,
an Eden wonderland compared to the
merciless jungle.
I hugged my mother, just 38 hours after another
son was sent to his grave,
and as yet more sons were left to
savage one another for a cause with
no purpose.
Our units were now broken
apart,
left alone to digest wordless stories that
couldn’t be spoken, that had no end,
and were only revealed in endless
nightmares.
We arrived as soldiers,
some to die quickly, some left alone
to die over the course of decades, an
acidic decomposition of
body, mind, and spirit,
until all that remained was a
set of soaked pajamas
of a little boy crying out
for help.

Author: poetryfest

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