Blessed are the Peacemakers;
awash in the blood of innocence,
their own culpability
coppery red upon their lips.
Never wage a war in a vacuum.
There is a simple rule
obeyed by all combatants.
Surrender,
only to your baser urges.
I have never killed a man.
I have never desired it so.
There was never a time that my hands craved blood,
that my teeth bared
and my weapons readied for the end
of my life,
or theirs.
That wide and yawning chasm of insanity;
black pit nightmare,
ravening madness,
sickened to the core.
Though troubled in my youth,
Death eluded me.
I never signed the waiver,
never asked permission;
never felt the courage,
or the desperation
to fly off the foreign lands
and deal out Justice
with raucous aplomb.
The only blood on my hands
is my own.
While my generation died in scores
over on some forsaken mountain range
in a land never conquered by a foreign force;
I was trying to survive
my own mind;
my own war.
The only grave I ever dug
was for myself.
I dumped the corpse of my past
into a fetid hole
and left it there.
Fucking old vampire
still comes around from time to time
and wails at my window,
but that war will never end.
Trauma to the mind
is trauma to the mind
and trauma to the mind
is forever.
Death is a constant
and those who have known Death
know that it will never leave them.
Once it has your scent;
it stalks you,
desiring your soul
and sometimes,
it’s easy to imagine losing the war,
but you fight it anyway.
Some of us don’t get to choose our fight,
but the blood is still coppery red on our lips
and our hands
and our eyes.
There will only ever be one day
when the pain will not be felt
and we fight to hold off that day
as long as possible,
while there is still life here
that needs saving.
HG – 2017
