Beneath the floor we fortified
bunkers strong & trenches deep.
Then we bombed & then we blitzed.
For the dead we didn't weep.
Our plastic soldiers sprang back to life.
Our bunkers rebuilt from dirt.
We enacted a sickness from life above,
'cept our version didn't hurt.
Up there normal life went on
in some banal & boring way.
An affair we wanted no part of,
too deep in depths of our play.
Now.
Now my notes are my bunkers.
Now I am my own dirty dozen.
Soldiers not of plastic
but with plastic faces.
Now I bomb on test
and blitz on girls.
And I still don't pause to weep.
Now life's sickness sticks to me
like discarded bubble gum on a hot sidewalk.
It's the sidewalk that trails
one battlefield to next.
Could I crawl beneath that sidewalk?
Could I leave the dorks up above?
Could I get back to that painless, plastic world?
Could this poem begin
to rhyme again?
Could the last word be love?