wartime love letter

and the accordian played with revelry during the despairing war
where children ate shoe leather and dead soldiers still sent letters
post-dated to their loves that had endlessly wintered with the nocture
of gunfire and guerilla reprisals. next, the girl on stage had an astonishing
youth you only find in the fraily beautiful, the kind of youth that reminded
one of sparrow bones, it was so light and fragile. she could have been a mother,
but for us her voice was virginal, trilling like a master violin and lulling us
into somnolence in front of our whiskey glasses that we forgot how to drink during
her song.

they broke into the temple and stole all the candlesticks, they painted swastikas
on top of our altars and forced us to use their own magic, the vile disgusting blackness of dark hearts labors, locked in dead literature like a starving parakeet, pecking at the paint on the bars with a hook beak. and our temples remained open all through the murders, the war brought murders and the war brought famine, we were lucky if we were dead.

but the girl sang, frail Europa locked like a nightengale in the foilage, chirping raw swollen melodies of loss like a desperate mother bird looking for her eaten young.

nobody applauded, we who's backs had been worked in and whos breath labored under the strain of poor cigarettes, we who danced yesterday but cried today at the sad fact that there is no real description of loss or warding it off, that it comes upon you in the form of a frail innocent deer trying to rouse feelings of beauty and diminishes only when you diminish in its stead, like a candle blowing out its own light.

the war continues, the unspoken war and the televised war, which are two different wars.

tomorrow night they will have a jazz band filled with negroes who barely escaped New Orleans with their lives, who found spare solace in the breasts of kind brothers that took them into their houses. there are few of them left, both true brothers and true musicians.

there are few of us left. you know this isn't a lie.

i still have crayon pictures from the days when children played boardgames in the hallways, when adults still seemed kind and guileless, when porches were still being built on houses, when every house had a bookcase. Are they lies or are they what you call history? Are we the history of defeat, of courage, of bravery, or of the common heroism that locks itself in the soul like a chain that cannot be broken, the disperate element of individuality that stands up for individuality, and the breaking of molds for the sake of liberty sometimes, sometimes for the sake of survival.

I could love you, but you could never love me. Love exists only when it is first. And I would be second to you. I know this because you have got to put yourself first, above all and else. And that is the way it is. That is the way it has been for awhile, the way of the world's machines building themselves in our selfishness like invading armies destroying the sequence of the night's silence with gunpowder, occupations, and murder rooms where they torture you and your family because you were not well liked in your town.

I hope you are well liked.