was it worth it
losing my leg?
no, i don't think so
i'm nineteen
i keep thinking
how many years i've got
on one leg
sure maybe i'll get married
someday
to a woman who don't mind sleeping
with a fake leg
i've got my pension, of course
90% disability
10% of a man
i go to trade school
g i bill
uncle sam's gonna buy me a special car
for guys with one leg
once i had two legs and
never thought about it
sure if i was whole
i'd go back
fight some more
got to stop them
cant let them have their way
but the way i am
one leg
it's someone else's turn now
the ones who got killed
was it worth that?
yeah i guess so
we have to stop them
they say we have to stop them
they know better than me
but you know
i wonder
that whole goddam asian continent
aint worth my leg
not to me
not to me

early 1970s

dishing it out; taking it

a pig lay on his side still
breathing through the hole
in his flank
full of his pain and fear
drained of his blood
he lay waiting to die
family dogs teddy & buster
having many years smiled and wagged
under children's caresses
drooped now on chains
stringing with mud

wild together
running a herd of shoats
jaws bloody with throbbing flesh
feeding on the living
what madness runs in a dogbrain
at the sight of mass impotence?

early 1970s

A View from Behind Glass

A dragon is not slain in safety;
It will not fall to soft-bodied goldfish behind glass,
Nor to a fluff of puppy nipping its heels.

But a sheet of hard-shelled, fanged ants
Each vulnerable
Can make a tyrannosaurus
Ant turds.

c. 1975

Emergency

Both see collision coming
he looking in numbed horror
his foot on the floorboard-
she shrieking, "Gimme the wheel!"
kicks his foot away,
takes the shoulder,
then the ditch,
guiding the inert weight with precision
between the barbed wire
and the bank.

When momentum is exhausted
and they can emerge,
the Ford is unrecognizable
but their hearts beat on.

He mourns the ruins;
she is wrenching free
whatever is usable
for the trek back.

c. 1977