ONE-SIDED WAR

Like everyone else my struggle for life resembles
Napoleon's retreat from Russia,
with every victory of mine just a mere holding action.
Field Marshall Thanatos is the grand strategist
in this universal war of attrition.
Time is Thanatos's strongest cannon
and his redcoat soldiers are resolute and legion,
while my constitution is rife
with petty Benedict Arnolds betraying me cell by cell.
My vision blurs, my back aches,
my fingers and knees stiffen, my hearing is less acute,
and my taste for anything, including victory, dulls.
How sanguine, strong and deluded I was in my early years,
brazen like America at its birth.
I was certain I'd live in eternal freedom.
But all my petty victories, my Trentons and Bunker Hills
won only furloughs for me.
There were no Gettysburgs or Yorktowns,
to give me that decisive victory,
the conquest of forever.
Now I see the Grim Marshal in the distance.
He's commanding his redcoats to cut off all escape.
Soon I'll be surrounded.
Only the terms of surrender are in doubt.
Will my last day be like the bloody shock of Bull Run
where a frightened army retreated in panicky disorder,
or like the blazing heroics at the Alamo
where the last man standing wildly swung his bayonet,
or like the quiet dignity at Appomattox
where Grant respectively declined asking Lee for his sword, br> the victorious saluting the vanquished for a war well-fought.

DISINTERMENT

Even a final resting place becomes an unmade bed,
and old bones must yield to fast lanes
when a modern highway is planned.
The bones of nineteenth century tycoons must scatter
before the fast growing arteries of twenty-first century commerce.
You can't take it with you,
but if you're willful enough and put it in your will,
then maybe you can sneak through a token,
as with that exhumed potentate of capitalism,
who tried a new career as a smuggler in the afterlife and hoarded
not as much ill-gotten gains found within the pyramids of pharaohs,
but rather a pocket watch within a fine mahogany coffin,
no longer ticking, of course, and strewn among disarticulated ribs.
The fob and case were gold, the hours were jewels,
and the whole face was covered by purest crystal.
It was worth a year's wages of a factory worker from that same era,
one who might have been buried in potter's field
and whose bones would have long been digested by the acid soil.
But this grave of the once great was marked by the finest marble.
Alas, acid rain dissolved the inscription, br> so the industrialist's name was eaten
by the belched wastes of his own industry.
What the newspapers reported most,
the reason for the story,
was that his skeleton was found backwards.
When first laid in that new coffin,
his now decayed butt once mooned heaven.
Perhaps this rear end burial was his arrogant wish,
perhaps it also explains the pocket watch,
for time was still money for him
and that impatient soul had to wait for the judgment day
when world would turn upside down, and so he'd be poised
to immediately meet with the chairman of the board,
a man of affairs firmly shaking hands with the supreme creator of all affairs.
After all, don't the elites keep their own company?
And can't cash buy the ear of a president or pope?
But maybe his face was laid downwards
simply because the destination of his soul was certain,
and so he was pointed in the right direction
with no chance of getting lost.

ON JUDGEMENT DAY

the soul is judged by failures of the flesh it no longer wears.
Without skin, muscle, blood, and bone that soul is no longer
he or she, young or old, comely or homely.
Were it not for the soul
the consciousness of the flesh
would be bracketed by oblivion.
But without a body
there would be no senses,
and without the five senses could existence make sense?
Without skin the mind can no longer touch or be touched.
And without touching or being touched
the heart can't feel or have feelings.
And there can be no redolence of a former life
after the nose rots away.
Without a mouth no food needs tasting,
nor is there any lingering desire
to kiss a loved one's salty skin.
And without ears the tempted ego is finally made deaf
to the devil's whispered temptations.
But neither can the defendant soul
hear the stentorian verdict rendered from the high bench.
And the final pounding of the gavel
begins a sentence of infinite years.
The soul convicted
confronts sheer darkness with eyeless sight
and dreams longingly of the body's flesh, bone, blood,
and its five senses forever lost.
But the soul acquitted
doesn't miss even a cell from its corporeal past.
And it glows in a radiance that dispels a lifetime of blindness
and without seeing, sees its own existence.

DESIGNER HELLS, BY BUDDHA

Tantalus had been neck deep and without hope until he glimpsed Buddha.
And lo, he had no more illusion of hunger.
And lo, he had no more illusion of thirst.
Without hunger
there's no desperate grabbing for fruits dangling just out of reach.
Without thirst
there's indifference to the neck-deep waters of damnation.
And without hunger and thirst,
there can be no sour or bitter aftertaste
Thus the torments of the Hellenic hell are conquered.
But without hunger and thirst
there's nothing to bite into,
nothing to sip, nothing to taste,
and nothing to reach for. br> So Tantalus's idle hands start slapping his face
until blood is drawn
and he savors his own salty blood dripping onto his tongue.
as he yearns for any kind of death,
even death by boredom,
except he is already dead.
Meanwhile Sisyphus hauls stone all the way uphill,
where for a moment. just a moment, at the very top,
his arms fall limp and a sensation of relief courses through his veins.
He's high above Hades, nearer to heaven, so high,
then the crash of course,
and again the endless pushing to regain the heights.
Buddha reincarnates him
as a heroin addict in Hell's Kitchen.

FORENSIC TRUTH

Factually it's wrong.
The error probably arose from a misperception,
a sloppy unscientific observation,
but myths die hard, unlike flesh.
Perhaps the myth was born from a desperate hope
that within a stilled finger remains a spark
awaiting rekindling by a magical breath
which somehow will again rage as a fire and rouge an ashen face,
or perhaps the myth is simply a failure to let go.
But no cabal of life rests on the nail bed,
no last holdout of the animate hides within a cuticle,
no spark flares to an eternal flame,
at least no corporeal spark,
not a growing but a shriveling.
The nail itself is lifeless and always was.
The illusion springs from the surrounding flesh,
it simply dehydrates, wrinkles, peels away,
the fold of tissue relaxes its grip.
The nail remains staid and stoic,
and as unyielding and palpable as rigor mortis.
The flesh is cold to the touch.
No skeleton finger points the way up or down.
Those seeking myths of eternity from the tangible will be disappointed.
For death will always do what it's meant to do,
survive the living.

HISTORICAL LEGACIES

They claim they'll consecrate new land elsewhere.
But the piled tombstones are badly weathered;
they'll fracture if moved.
The marbles lying here form a culvert for catching rain.
The planned new museum will become their cenotaph.
Charity Phelps is two hundred eight;
two hundred seven were marked by the stone.
For the sake of sanity she must have been quickly forgotten.
All the small slabs in this plot mark that year's plague.
New babies were quickly born.
But Charity Phelps existed.
Here before me is the inscribed proof,
the cuneiform of name, date of birth and death,
and the chiseled belief that she became an angel of Go . . . ,
the rest is badly faded.
I'd swipe the marker.
But the watchman is earning his salary.
I must let her be.
The rains will reduce her to jagged rock.

FORK IN THE ROAD

My bones stand naked in my skin.
Time to metamorphose,
shed my carapace that was worn to transparency
by living, simply living
day by day, minute to minute.
Time for rebirth as a butterfly or snake,
but which one?
A butterfly carries no trace of its former self,
the worm it once was;
a snake keeps its crawling form,
clearly hinting what it will become,
yet a bigger snake.
Butterflies have wings, are closer to angels;
snakes are more down to earth.
Butterflies are transient beauties,
the proverbial blazing meteor across a night sky.
In the "once upon a time"
one might even have landed on Eve's hair
when her tresses were bedecked with Eden's flowers
as she stood naked in her flesh.
They die, these fluttering angels, after their nuptial flights.
Snakes live through many frosty winters.
They resurrect themselves each spring
and flick out their tongues to taste the air,
find their mates and survive the mating.
Cold blooded, slithering, slow, earthbound, forked tongued,
and craftier than Eve,
I'll be a snake.

Richard Fein

You may e-mail Richard Fein at bardofbyte@aol.com