This poem is war; its touch is death. Midas
has pressed his paper from cold skin black
with gangrene; it holds only blood as ink.
Decayed corpses, ripe and raw, he has mined
as gold, piled conquest carcass-high with shells
now made a strange currency. More bodies,
more dead faces charred or shorn, more babies
ripped from wombs or never conceived, females
fucked and gutted, more stoop-backed figures lame
with age, more arms, more feet, more tender heads,
The curls of youth caked with mud, more foes, friends,
mired, stuck, marching for the gilded man.
Beware what lines war’s fatal alchemy
contains, unless through your veins his metal flies.
—published as “This poem is war; its touch is death,”
Lilies and Cannonballs Review, 2004