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Date of Discharge

Mike Brennan

    1.
    Scenes of the living dead/walking wounded and wound tightly with plenty of poetry packed too deeply downward to depict with pencil or pen nor paintbrush/ staring off into spaces that no one else can view except those who were there/ side by side/ marching potential patriotic suicides. Left, Right, Left/ sizing up the abyss with every peripheral movement of the eye. The 1,000 yard stares and hearts now stained purple with a presidential certificate and a check on the first of the month to manage the impossibility of being a working man/ a money making machine slaving amongst the masses for a second marriage that they pray was not yet another mortal mistake. Meanwhile tending wounds that won’t drift away except for barely enough money to kill all the pains/ with bottom shelf booze/a few bags of pot/ and a tidal wave of prescribed painkillers and tranquilizers to numb the legs/shoulders/ spine and brain/ at least a few measly hours until their return only feels like unmitigated revenge. God or any deity please just quell the TBI, Anxiety and PTSD/ The Red, White and Blue is at Half-Mast for reasons not known by any of us right now/ as we can’t watch or read the news around here. It upsets the patients we are told/ that religion and politics don’t mix with Ativan and Percocet and Cancer of the Prostate/ ISIS and the Senate could trigger panic attacks and seizures or strokes/ or is maybe why Charlie shot himself in the head after living just under 20 years in freak firefights on a road of orders from Bosnia to Afghanistan. Mark just wants more morphine until the end of the month when he can afford a motel room and just enough heroin for another 30 days of oblivion before just checking right back in. Jason slashed his wrists and straight across the throat and was depressed he was still breathing/ as the maid found him just a minute too soon he’d whine while shuffling playing cards while puffing on a Pall Mall/ smoke billowing from a hole in the neck- a broken stitched souvenir. “I’ve seen the devil and he is my mother,” Michael would say, after attacking her with a samurai sword and drinking a bottle of bleach on top of the vodka before the police would arrive to the crime scene/ she lived just barely amputated below the knees and he now keeps razor blades safe and secure under his tongue/ “I’ll slash myself in front of the shrinks if they say anything satanic”/now, he is on enough medicines his vocabulary is down to a drool. I’m here because I have nowhere else to go/ I actually now have no place else to go/ but maybe, surely/ a bit further down from here.

2.
    The Med Line is always way too long/ with not enough nurses/ reminding me of the lines to go puff smoke while sailing in circles in an ocean within an ocean during a war/ I couldn’t see but just believe from the bombs being farmed and sent short distances/ sortied off from the salty sanctuary/caged explosions kept out at sea. Longer lines than for lunch/even breakfast. I always hated a buffet/ Waiting! Waiting! Like a Junky for “The Man.” Lines are nothing but migraines and malaise/ especially to eat one of the anti-depressants, psychotics or anxiety formulas tested in laboratories on terrified monkeys. One of the newest ones even makes men grow breasts/ I saw a few that I figured were having changes of the sex. Anything is normal here/ and yet/ Nothing is normal here. Nightmares are the only normality I can say I personally know. If they aren’t mine I’m drawn into a shadowy other’s. Why I would be drawn into Vietnam flashbacks when I wasn’t even born yet? The White Coats can’t even explain all that to me. They only can just prescribe and write off my life on their legal and prescription pads. Seroquel has the nickname of SeroKill for a reason. Too many milligrams have wiped out an entire platoon of Marines in their solemn slumbers. I’m never sure if I will die in my sleep/ but like Hamlet/ I am only afraid that afterwards I will still keep dreaming. The Rub! The Horror! The Horror! My greatest fears are always of dreaming.

3.
    Tank Gunner/ 80% burned all over the body/ his eyelids can’t close/ shedding tears at random since they were never repaired beyond the retinas/ he had to put his head out of the hatch to catch the Hajji Hammer crash. They want him off the drugs he provides to himself religiously every payday/ he still loves the crack pipe since women look at him like Halloween/ but what else is there to live for when you don’t have your old battle thick trained and tailored skin? Burned almost to bone/black to white. I figured it was napalm not an IED/ which he hit unexpectedly just a few months after I swore away my soul and was maneuvering my own path through boot camp/ never volunteering/ and always practicing personal invisibility. I could always pull a Houdini. The Gunner would be stared at sideways for his whole life. Nobody would know that he once was and is a perfect specimen of a Man. Outside matching his Insides/ No Lies/ No Alibis/ too much for minutely tourists to recognize or accurately analyze.

4.
    Group therapy/ a young Marine is discussing how he had to kill a child insurgent in Ramadi/ suddenly the 5.0 burst in the room and approach a young ex-sailor, a Boatswains Mate, seated directly across from me. “Mr. Sullivan, please stand up and put your hands behind your back. You’re wanted on a warrant for possession of Child Pornography.” I saw this happen to another guy while I was still in the service/ downloaded to disk drive to imminent vice detective downfall/ that squid swore it was an accident but I’m sure he’s still in Leavenworth/ chipping rocks into smaller rocks or so they always say the defrocked crews and platoons in Kansas are rumored to be ordered to do. Sullivan screams, “It’s not me! This is my ex-wife trying to keep me from seeing my son. I’m set up. She knows all the passwords to my accounts!” He’s crying hysterically/ and for some reason/ unlike the other set of short eyes/ I have unfortunately had seen/ I kind of believed him. Our session ends early thanks to this strange spectacle/ the whole group signed out to go to a small shack holding twenty of us too tightly together to comfortably smoke. The Marine was huffing and puffing along as well/ still crying about what had happened accidently back in Iraq.

5.
    Curtis was sent here by his parents because he refused to leave his bedroom for months after coming home from the Army/ and back to his video games and the money set aside from combat infantry duties for his long planned personal gun collection/ and they obviously feared his becoming another soldier suicide statistic/ as seen occasionally in the Huffington Post or on 60 Minutes. Tyreese is a giant 6'6, 250 pounds of ex-Marine muscle/ Curtis looks like he should still be roaming the halls of a high school heading to homeroom/ and why he accepted the Nike’s Tyreese stole from Walmart/ none of us would know/ other than Ty obviously liked his boys young and wet behind the ears/ and Curtis was beet red naïve with a babies’ blondish blush. I was a little hurt that I guess I looked too old for him at 27/ I’d jest/ while Curtis must have only been 22/ which is likely why he took him back to his old basement room. Just a walk across the way from our wing/ where he knew nobody would be home to hear Curtis’ cries/ which is all he did for weeks. Well at least until Mark introduced him to heroin and heard all the dreadful details/ long after Tyreese disappeared from the scene without saying anything to anybody/ not anyone. Mark killed Curtis then soon after shakily saved his life/ with a bottle of Narcan he bought from the clinic where the junkies got their morning methadone because he thought it might be handy in case of an emergency OD/ since he wasn’t really too keen on getting clean. An emergency which Curtis became the night before his 90 day discharge date. He turned that special shade of blue/ so very few/ ever come back from... Mark brought him around to life again and then Curtis went home/ a hundred times worse for the wear and tear than the war or ever before/ including the shrapnel still stuck in his back/ but someone told the staff all that had happened/ and Mark was told to straight hit the skids. From what I’ve seen Mark still lives in the park across the street. Less than a block away from where Curtis had been raped repeatedly. I can’t figure out how he didn’t see that they both were swimming with sharks/ until the jaws were already taking them down to those places where no-one can be expected to see/ but as human beings still struggle against both life and death for the shallowest of a single breath.

6.
    7.16.15. The fears that only grew as I did from 5'4 to 6 feet tall before graduating from High School/ that Summer before the Fall of 2001/ greeting a Second and mysterious new Millennium! Sounding off so soon with four horrific booms!/ with visions of dust, ashes and doom/ with the crusades repeating themselves religiously/ which have more than begun/ to hatch and sprout their blood wings and bomb what once was realized as the All-American Dream. We have lost what we were ordered to patrol and protect/ and what so many prayed to catch a plane back homeward away from/ and what many only did with a flag to fly just across the body and what may or may not be intact of the face/ for a family and friends to fatally and finally kiss/ goodbye, god-speed, good luck and that final goodnight/ to such sweet princes and princesses/ only if what remained wasn’t crushed like a mother’s heart/ too severely enough to display in an open casket. From Fallujah to New York City/ Boston to South Carolina to Tennessee/ Hatred studies it’s laptops and makes maps/ while we riot against each other and the Metro P.D/ too locked into views of black and white/ like last centuries prototype TVs/ of patrol cars and couch potato criticisms/ crisped to crumbs/ to see the flames scorching both flanks and all sides/ while drifting into a decay and disarray of daily mass homicides. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. And for tomorrow/ in the darkness before the dimming dawn/ I give away my final decree of RIP.

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