Fixer

I am not a fixer of things.
I am not kin to the machine,
the board, the roof, or wall.
In point of fact,
I can't fix anything,
anything at all.

Things before me broken
tend to stay that way,
and tools are wary in my hands
until they're put away.

I don't believe the broken things
fear me or dislike me.
I'm pretty sure they just wish
I'd go and let them be.

She Says

She says I shouldn't forget
but I don't remember why.
She says I used to love her...
can't remember, though I try.

She says I loved our children
and they tell me this is so.
She says I should remember,
tell her why I had to go.

I cannot see the past of her,
no history there resides,
but in the future we'll remember
why I left and why she cried.

Talk Of War

When I listen to this talk of war,
I see that creates its own gravity,
orbiting with impunity
around our collective insanity.
It is pushing, pulling events
into odd, warped patterns,
sending fleets out on
manufactured missions.
I am ascending to near reason
in order to land
somewhere
between war and now,
where seeds of peace have been sewn,
where no one dies a silly death.
Someone you might know
died on a battlefield today.
It was supposed to be
someone else,
one of those
other guys.

You know, the dead all get together,
dance at rude reunions, dancing dead dances,
some with parts removed.
It's front page stuff
because the dead ooze news
and the media dreams of multiple fronts,
and some folks think that
guns are fun.

I think what we want is stillness;
no nearby thuds or thumps,
no screech of shells incoming from arc-lit skies.

I think what we really want is
NO MORE WAR

Brand new poems

Every Generation

Every generation gets at least one war.
It's just one of those things.
A gruesome milepost,
showing just how far they've come,
weapon-wise, and a
puncuation mark
at the end of their hopes and dreams.

The sons and daughters
of every generation
get their own
flag draped coffins,
their own mass graves,
to prove they have participated
in their designated war(s).

Every generation gets at least one war
to acquire for themselves
assorted ideas and other things;
freedom or selected gods,
gold or oil,
land or water,
and other engines of sacrifice
to the certainty of
still more war.

Every generation gets at least one war;
builds armies,
breeds soldiers,
never knowing where their souls may go,
or if they were issued souls at all.

Truth be told,
none of us can tell
where one war ends and the next begins....

Every generation gets at least one war,
even though war logic is fractal,
difficult to measure with only
esoteric quantities of
death and destruction
to calculate the degree of commitment
to their particular war.

Every generation gets at least one war...
Its just one of those things.


Mike O'Connell
5/1/09
#2
Dear, Dear Death

I flirted with dear Death one time,
but She wouldn't have me,
don't know why.
Perhaps I was not worthy,
not commited enough
to love Her and to die.
....and so, on I go,
though I know where She lives still.
Up the hill on Cemetary Road,
lined with headstones,
chiseled by Her will.

Death lives up the road from here,
but I never stop to see Her.
(She keeps nasty beasts, I'm told,
with sharpened fangs and bristling fur!)

She'll break down and come my way,
visit me someday,
take me up and bury me,
then go on Her way.

Mike O'Connell 4/09

At The Pit

Weightless relics in army blanket shrouds,
piled before the pit, appear too stick-like, too numerous,
to be have once been human.
The mind is wrenched,forced to see things less horrid;
The crows are healthy, the flies fat and fast.
Emotions must be numbed to prevent overwhelming despair.
The youngest, the oldest,the ones who died exhausted
from the struggle to bring them all here,
are piled the highest at the edge of the pit.
They will be the first to be desecratedby jackals and Caterpillar blades.
Just at dawn, before sounds amplify,
before the stench breaks free of its fragile,dewy net,
the corpse heap seems to waver.
It heaves from the pressures released
as bloated bodies collapse and give into the weight of friends,
ripples as the heat of the rotting rises up to meet the sun.
Then, the mothers come.
The empty mothers with opaque eyes,
memory muffled wails, halting, half recited prayers
whose words are the lyrics for an orchestra of waking flies.
The mothers will not hear them,
or see the worms in their children’s eyes
or be fooled by the prayer’s most holy disguise
or stay to see the dead sealed off from the sky.
The mothers have removed themselves,
have resigned themselves.
Only their strength of heart has borne them this far.
Now, they wait.
They must be the last layer on the sad grave.
Their bones must be the headstones,
the guardians of the martyrs beneath…
the last to fall from the light of hope.


Mike O'Connell
2009