Monday, May 07, 2007

Projections and War II.

Soft cotton shoes offered only the slightest protection from the pace of a refugee. Out before the fires and well before the haunt of occupation, gone so long before that not even a smell of burning generations would reach her. Night was unplanned and unprepared for. It was nestled on moss and warm stones, shivering.

Catastrophe leaves a flavor in the mouth of the moment, but behold there are no terrified mobs - no executions. No fools gallows or lead ridden brick. Why has thine enemy become so generous? What are soldiers without an intent to punish, a mind might ask itself in the heat of this dreadful anticipation. That voice of the mind would have seen the treachery in Dresden, the lonesomeness in the outcome of WYrzburg, and though of what hearts must be forged in to claim today as its own.

Defeated, this town and I, each burning out as the sun set and the embers roared and lapped. I held a camera, but the burning screamed back to life in my spine, my guts. Breseler sat again by my side tonight, what courage. A young man and his fallen hero drifting through miles of war, in a race to bottle these pornographic monstrosities of battle into labeled jars to sit forever on a shelf labeled 'past'. I am in honor of your courage, young Europe and young Breseler, may I have the sanctity to die only after your wedding.

Projections and War I.

Thin cotton shoes do little to cushion the long strides among sharp pebbles and winding roads. Steps are with sidelong glances attached, a jutting sack of perishables, coarse breathing. Somewhere an elephant trumpets and crashes through the undergrowth of crunchy autumn forest. They let the animals free from the zoo before the town burns. Everyone listens, even dispersed from each other as they may be, and waits for a careful gunshot, a report across long drained skies that the first had fallen.

Men huddled in twos and threes, clutching garden tools, sheltered away in a distant shack or cellar. Families took to the wet gravel roads with bundles and hope. The old lives begin to splinted and smolder. The houses burn from the inside in a precession of crackling timbers and seared dust.

I couldn't stand to let it burn, but who am I but an old limping horse. I could do nothing but whimper into the coarse seats of our jeep while Breseler caught the scene in a big whir of clicks and celluloid. Admittedly, a weak point.

I knew still that it was bigger than he and I.