War Song

It takes about nine hundred pounds of force to break a human bone.
They’re sixty five times stronger than concrete, five times stronger than steel.
They’ll outlast all of us and all of our heroes, everyone we’ve ever cared about.
Still, I’ve seen bones cleaved in half.
Impacts sending shards out everywhere like shrapnel. 
I remember a kid, screaming and screaming with a compound fracture,
The remains of his femur jutting out like a knife blade,
The sandy dust in the wound,
The blood on the bone,
The white of his teeth,

The screams,

The screams,

The scream.

When we picked him up, it felt like he was already dead.
Shock set in and he was shivering, shivering in the hundred degree heat.
The world is a series of compound fractures,
Shards and shards of bone, 
Broken teeth and bloody grins.
Bullets cut from flesh.
Bullets you can still feel inside of you.
Scars that burn and ache and sting.
I knew a man who kept a bullet pulled out of him on a string around his neck,
It was a good luck charm, a tumor removed, an assurance of life.
It rested above his heart with his dog-tags,
And banged against his chest in time to his heart beat.
Another kept trophies, teeth and bones and discarded weapons.
I kept memories, tangled up inside of me, the words of dead men.

When I was sixteen, I was a sun-kissed kid, tanned and strong in that boyish kind of way,
Gangly and awkward, with my bones too big for my body.
I was sitting on the green, green, green grass at the bank of a lake.
My pants were rolled up to my knees and my shirt was unbuttoned and my hair was wet,
And my cheeks hurt from laughing with the girl next to me.
I can’t remember her face, just her short summer skirt and her polished Mary-Janes.
She was my first kiss, her lips were soft and sweet and she guided my hand up her shirt,
And I remembered the burning blush on my cheeks and how she giggled when she saw it.
It’s hard to believe that was just three years ago.

Three years.

Three years…

Three goddamn years.

Now we bathe in rivers because it’s the only thing we’re gonna get.
We throw each other in the water and play marco polo and live like we’re children,
Because we are, we honest-to-god are.
We’re nineteen and instead of being young and in love,
We’re shot at and stabbed and blown up and broken, over and over again.
We laugh breathless on the banks because it’s all we can do.
If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry and that’s just how it was.
We play hopscotch in the mine fields.
We play tag with knives and guns; BANG, you’re it.
We play hide and seek and hide and seek and hide and seek until we kill or are killed.

The first thing I did when I got home was kiss my mother.
The second thing I did was take a shower, try to wash the dirt off of me.
It was a strange kind of dirty,
The kind where you turn the water as hot as it goes and let the steam spread,
So you don’t have to look yourself in the eye.
Without all the weight of everything, the pack, the guns, the ammo, the heat, the fear, the tension,
I felt lighter, too light, like I was going to drift away and never come back.
I felt like I was standing outside of myself. 
My memories were like watching a fucked up movie,
The kind no one in their right mind would go to see.
I was sitting in a movie theater filled with dead boys watching explosion after explosion,
The kid to my right was missing his lower jaw and his tongue lolled and he applauded.
The kid to my left had a bullet hole for an eye and he clapped his hand on my back and said:
Remember when that happened? God, we talked about that for weeks.
When we watched the bullet hit him in the head and watched him fall back like a domino.
The kid in front of us turned around and told us to shut up, he was trying to watch the movie.
His skin was pale and waxy and he looked wrinkled,
Like your fingertips do after you swim for too long.

And then I was back in the shower,

My skin rubbed raw from washing over and over.

My skin rubbed raw from trying to get back to the person I used to be.

The hot water ran out and I just stayed there, in the cold, 
Sitting on the bone white floor of the bathtub.

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Originally written in 2017.