Flatuent Bursts of Iraq

Posted on March 29, 2005 in Prose Arcana War

Errorer’s Note: Recently, I set myself to outlining a poem about war. I feel uncomfortable with such subjects, so I began with a prose narrative. Didn’t see much poetic in it, so I decided to present it as it appeared coming from the pen.

It’s like a tape recorder, rewound and playing back the banshee screams and the flatuent bursts of Vietnam. Oliver North dressed up in his green suit, ignored the advice James Michener gave him on the matter of honor and integrity. He told the nation that he hadn’t lost the war — we had, which was an answer to a question nobody should have asked in those hearings which were about the money he scraped off the top of the illegal Contra accounts. Colonel North put the fuel in the Hummers, revved up the engines that chanted “we lost the war in Indochina, we shall not allow this to happen again!”

— and so we come to Iraq, ideal tank territory if you stick to the flatlands in the south. Iraq, which we pronouce “I rack” as if torture were a sacrament when carried out between minarets. Otherwise you can pronounce it “I rock”, a declamation of grandiosity, something like what I heard a waiter say the other night as he went from table to table. “Rock and roll!” The war is a barbecue with a heavy metal soundtrack scooping out the tiny ear bone, breaking the membrane.

When they smell the burning flesh in the morning, the jarheads think of Colonel Kilgore and they say “I love the smell of dead men”. They look for ways to fuck Iraqis. by “fuck”, I don’t mean that they sodomize or rape them — at least not outside the prisons — I mean they shoot, skewer, bayonet, bomb, burn, beat, thrash, bully, intimidate, kick, slug, blow up, torch, stab, splinter, decimate, bump, bind, stuff, torture, and eradicate them, man and woman, parent and child. When I listen to the news, I realize that this is not Vietnam, it is a movie written by a hack screenwriter bought by a second rate producer to star an actor though low in talent is popular with Republican financiers and benefactors. It will play in the theaters for maybe two weeks and then haunt us at video stores for years on end, kept on the racks for all to see and few to rent, its scenes repeated on overhead television screens to drum up business.

A bad movie is a bad movie. That makes them cheap for the networks to rent. And tonight, I am listening to the tape which plays the words I rock, you rock, he/she/it rocks, and everyone dies because that’s the nature of war. You clowns: people end up as pools of red sludge in the unpaved streets.