Mario! We can fix pipes and go on fabulous adventures together. I love that little plumber man.

tags: writer's block

 I have a sickness. It's an addiction. There's nothing I can do to help it, there is no treatment. There are no support groups, and it is not recognized by the APA as an actual disorder. That doesn't make it any less real, or myself any less affected by it.

It's the military. My name is Specialist Copland, and I've been addicted to the US military, Army specific, for the past four years. I can't seem to help it; nothing seems as important to me as the military does. I could win the lottery, become a best selling author, and marry the man of my dreams, but if the Army came calling to send me to some shit-hole-in-the-ground desert country where a large group of people wanted to kill me, I would drop everything and pack my bags. Happily.

If I see a soldier on a TV commercial, I go still and pay close attention. I see a soldier in real life, and something stops and settles inside me. I drive onto an Army post, and some part of me that I didn't even realize was tense relaxes. I pick up every book, and watch every movie, that has anything to do with the military. I get ridiculously excited when a conversation happens onto anything having to do with the military. I get infuriated if I hear the mildest slight against the military. Ridiculous. 

I only recently discovered that neither nursing, nor medicine, is right for me. I know I will never be a civilian nurse, as long as I can help it. However, if the Army asked it of me, I would dedicate myself completely to nursing the sick and the wounded. I don't like being a nurse, but I am humbled and honored to be called "Doc."

The more I try to tear away from the Army-the more I try to deny its importance to me-the more miserable I am. When I bow my head and finally give in, it brings a torrent of relief, and even release. Surrender is not painful. It is a strange kind of comfort to know that I am a part of something so much larger than me, and that I would die for it.

Maybe 24 hours. After that, I might start getting lonely.

mood: contemplative tags: intel, my lifescoop, unplugged, writer's block

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

COME my tan-faced children,

Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,

Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?

Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,

We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,

So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,

Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?

We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,

We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,

Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,

Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,

Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,

We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,

We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,

From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,

From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,

Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein'd,

All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!

O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!

O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,

Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,

(bend your heads all,)

Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd mistress,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,

By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,

Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,

With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,

Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!

Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?

Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd.

Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,

Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,

Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life's involv'd and varied pageants,

All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,

All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,

All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,

All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,

We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,

Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!

Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,

All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,

All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,

We to-day's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!

O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!

Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!

(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)

Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,

Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,

Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?

Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors?

Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?

Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding on our way?

Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,

Far, far off the daybreak call-hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,

Swift! to the head of the army!-swift! spring to your places,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

-Walt Whitman

 A soldier

licks his lips as he
watches my hand
dip a bifurcated needle
into the vial of
smallpox
and tap the excess off

 

He flinches when
I touch him
and I feel his muscle tense
as I grip his arm
but he makes no noise
when I jab him fifteen times
and then squeeze to
draw blood

 

He frowns at the bandage
that I lay over the wound
and he thinks that
it wasn’t as bad as
his buddies made it
out to be

 

When the next soldier
steps up his eyes
stay on the vial as if
it will attack him and I
hear the same question
that I have heard from the
hundreds of lips of
the boys whose job it is
to kill
and be killed

 

Is this gonna hurt?

 We are deploying

he said
maybe on Monday
or the week after
or perhaps in October
to Iraq or
Afghanistan or some other
hole in the ground
at the end of the earth
where millions of names
are written on millions
of bullets that are as eager
to find a home
as dogs in a pound

 

Or maybe
tomorrow
you will go to
a fairy tale place
where angels press
their cold hands to your sides to
help you breathe
their golden heads bowed
over your broken bodies
as they try to heal you
with beautiful tears

 Under my fingers 

the wrappers encasing
the needles in
sterility
fall away
like so much dead skin
from the body of a snake
deposited into a trashcan
that is swathed in a
billowy white bag
like a child playing ghost
for Halloween.
I watch a decorated
Airborne Ranger

(De oppresso liber)

at the front of our station
not moving except to shift his weight
from one foot to the other,
reading the sign that says
STAY BEHIND BLACK LINE
UNTIL CALLED
He is called forth
and I watch him
sit down to
get his blood pressure taken
before he receives the
Anthrax vaccine

I see a flash of sun
off the pane of the frosted glass
window
and I believe the rain
has stopped falling
but I cannot see
if there is a rainbow
enlightening the clouds

 The classroom lies in a quiet sleep

the slumbering of a giant beast 

whose lifeblood is the talk and laughter 

of the students coming after

its every exhalation, 

the booming respiration

of knowledge being siphoned through 

the ears of sleepy soldiers who

must carry on the grand memory 

of old war heroes of history.

 

Untroubled by ghosts of classes past

what they know now will last and last

in the collective memories of medics all,

who care long after our comrades fall

in bloody wars and battle sears and

rends history and memory’s tears.

 

Quiet now, the classroom draws

again on its own natural pause

between the classes of future and past;

it’s a feeling that cannot last

but now in silence is golden 

and for a moment peace is beholden.

 

A picture is shown crooked in the fading light

but a hand reaches out to correct this slight,

and pulls back, and is then gone

to allow the gentle beast to slumber on.

 The music only she can hear

Dares the wind to blow it away

Her mind fracturing in the sunrise

 

She is falling from the sky 

Caught in the fishing net of a dream

Not knowing the world is broken

 

She is so beautiful

But no one can find her

No matter how hard they seek

They cannot hear her music

 

She has conducted symphonies

Caught in her fishing net

Dreaming of gods and ships and silence

Singing of the endless grasping ocean

 

She dreamt once of sanity

But the music was wrong

And so slipped back into her sea-sky

To be dragged singing into the riptide

 This is one of the poems that my teacher exclaimed over and made me feel that I could indeed be a published writer one day. It makes me happy to think about, in any case.

There's a floury madness 

snowing off the kitchen table

to the floor

 

The hammered dough 

takes up more than me

 

A pie shape rising 

in the yeast

 

We work side by side by side

though there is a 
 

canyon between us

 

No one is driving the rolling pin

and I wonder what to touch

What comes next

 

My shrug mirrors my sister's

Her mind I sometimes confuse with my own

You can't see the chains that bind us

 

This is a shared memory

among the few women 

of our household

 

The light spinning on the floor

The sun too big too bright too loud

Our feet kicking dandelions

Our snow breaths fogging the air

Knowing we've lived centuries

 

It is a long refrain.