Letter from a Soldier

I never knew this place could exist

back in the days when I was home and

the sunshine was a never-ending bliss

that warmed your back and kissed your throat, like a lover.

Here, time not measured by hours or minutes, but by

cigarettes, counted out into our waiting, humbled hands

by the guard that has taken a liking born out of pity to us,

three boys much too far away from home.

It's dark here, damp, musty too. I think they've got us

underground

the same level as that

Albanian girl I saw whose body was thrown into a makeshift grave and

her bones are probably three feet left of my ear when I sleep at night

If you can call it sleep.

When I wake up in the morning, my head is still throbbing

with the sound of the guns that shouted all through the night.

I'm dreaming of California palm trees and ocean waves

to soothe my eyes that have been rubbed raw by the sight of

these foreign hills, this barren land,

the naked corpses.

"Join the navy and see the world"

but we've joined the army and seen hell itself

and I won't win any medals for telling you that I'm scared to death.

I never knew that people could turn on each other with the savagery of

crazed dogs

with no regard for age, youth, beauty.

And as I write these words to you, a hundred times over in my mind

because that guard can't give me any pen or paper

and he won't risk his job or his life

to put this in the mail for me

I can see them scatter in the wind, like so many ashes

that fall from my cigarette tip

and fail to ever set the world on fire.