Protest-Written 1992

            We war in Bosia, the Cubans beat themselves to death worrying about Castro while they get their balls cut off at home.  Bobbitt pays his bills with a sewn-on penis, the Haitians get nothing for nothing, the Jamaicans wait table, the Huizengas of the world invest in solid waste to say the least.  O. J. Simpson slices up history and wants to talk about it, paid per view, and Pizza Hut puts pepperoni and cheese in the crust.  America sits numb as a Klondike Bar while the world heats up the ovens for another go.  Kids all over everywhere whack off momma's head, shoot Papa for a trip to Disneyworld and if you don't like that, cancel your NO Fault, NAFTA contract and lease a car. 

            I read stories of wandering crooks and I watch jobless kids hooking in Holiday Park.  I try to imagine some reason for driving up and down I-95, in small wars of little people gone crazy in a swirl of defeat, and broken brains.  What happened to us?

            1969.  I see the swirling day under big sky Washington Monument, how the hill fills with sweeps of beards and hoots and soft sweet songs of somewhere new.  All day sweat sticks to us like new dawn.  All day we wait and listen to the speeches.  Coretta King slices the air with cool oration of where she's been, suffered and how we're here because of wars over there and wars to be fought at home. 

            We eat what we can in the slippery grass running up the hill in the heated day of a war that can't seem to end, and I'm afraid  because I'm still in the Navy, that a camera will catch my military haircut.  The FBI and CIA takes pictures. The screaming little guy in the tee shirt next to me could be a narc, a pig. 

            All day we wait.  Linda's tired but willing, her long face and longer red hair pushed back over her shoulders, her ten year old daughter, Michelle excited, barely knowing why, wants to be with me and wants to know something besides endless treks from one husband or boyfriend to the next.  Her little picket fence smile is full of hope and grit as we swim along with the swirly crowds up and around and the endless swaying hot dog vegetarian day runs clear to the Lincoln Monument. 

            All day the excitement grows; all day we hope for what we're not sure of, a stop to the evil war, the war that "over there," the war that has one ship wondering what the other did, the Westpac, COM 4, Westmoreland's water buffalo counts, South Vietnamese abandoning battle stations to stage their own coups five miles away so the American troops get cut to pieces by their own mines trying to recapture Catholicism in the mud.  All day long the guns pump, recoil big orange smoke rings into the flashy newsy nights.  TVs in all the wardrooms and officers clubs from Hon Matt to Saigon, blink a story choreographed in teenage boy sweat and blood fed buy NBC and little Dan Rathers poking their noses down gun barrels and trenches for the sometimes made up battles with medals.  

            We wait by the big bump Washington Monument reaching to a sky that no longer holds real air/  We wait for the dark, the hand-held candle threaded through an ever bobbing hungry desolate night.  We march down off the hill to Pennsylvania Avenue toward the dome, to the curve in the road, the S that sweeps to the White House, the candles forming a stream, a poetry, the hum the silence overcoming us, the lights in the White House steady, the windows empty, the thundering silence lost in that breathtaking night the President isn't home and won't come out of his so-big White House ever, as long as we all shall live. 

            Now it all seems so long ago and these days, hope knocks on the door with its hand out.  How can we cope?  How do we detach?  All the soldiers have gone home to fight another war.  We dream of the hushed night of candles.  We hear the anthems echo down the hall.  We wait for the phone to ring.  Now I wonder where Linda and Michelle went.  I stand under Orion on a one in a million cold Florida night.  I wonder what have we learned?