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“He’s not alive And I can’t make him alive.” Words of a mother who lost her son in Iraq. Her grief drips down her face like melted candle wax And my heart caves in my chest when I hear her say, “He’s not alive And I can’t make him alive.” As if she could pluck her anguish out of the air and use it to patch his open wounds. And Rip away at her anger, confusion, pain, remorse, and Faction a battle-dressing across his torso. Breathing life into his inanimate body with every teardrop and cold sweat Willing him back into her arms. Reading his last letter aloud, The ink absorbs into her fingertips and travels Through her arm Past her brain-stem and Pries open the curtain window-lashes of naiveté And for the first time she sees. She sees that we’re all being held down with combined counter-balance of a million dreams for a Better tomorrow Offset with a handful of “haves” and “have-mores” who hold an iron grip monopoly on Better tomorrows. Only… The words don’t just affect her. They permeate my eardrums, Blaze past my unconscious And obliterate my eyelids so that I am forced to perceive things that I don’t want to see like Teeming masses of huddled humanity herded inside a box with the bolts tightened down. I have seen novels composed on the backs of broken/burned Iraqi children. I have seen firebombs that could not extinguish a single flower on the banks of the Tigris Euphrates. I have seen a grown man pray for peace while simultaneously pulling a trigger against the temple of a 5 year old boy. I have seen God cry and don’t know if they were tears of pain or tears of joy & My clinched fists bleed blood that could slit wrists and bare witness to the misfits inside a tempest But I’m All outta flow. And I don’t know if I should rage, breakdown, or cry Whenever I hear her say, “He’s not alive And I can’t make him alive.”
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