To meet today’s prompt; after much wondering, looking, rabbit-hole tripping-into, and unsuccessful Google hunts, I landed on a line (two, actually) to bogart from the poem “Weatherman” by Emily XYZ (from the book, Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the Poemfone Poets, (eds.: Jordan and Amy Trachtenberg).
The prompt was to write a poem that begins with a line from another (person’s) poem. The line(s) I chose begin Emily’s poem and mine: “Had I been a bomb builder then instead of a baby // boomer which I was which I am still”….
Baby Bomber
Had I been a bomb builder then instead of a baby
boomer which I was and which I am still,
I could have been either famously infamous,
or just plain old famous.
For my cause I could have maimed and murdered
my way into a second life as a Jeff Dunham puppet.
Born after, I missed the big WW-two, was virtually clueless
about a Korean War which ended on my 7th birthday,
but the big boom-boom, GI-numbah ten, at 17,
that dirty old Southeast Asian War for which I was almost eligible for the draft,
so I joined up. Git ‘er done, ya know?
But ten years later, as that buff bomber guy, I learned how nukes were made (Top Secret with critical nuclear weapon design information/CNWDI).
I coulda kilt many a monkey (literally) in Nam, disabled shit factories and fried females that the Chinese didn’t kill for crowd control, or pounded the Rooskys so hard I might have sterilized Putin’s daddy. Coulda but didn’t.
Never built a bomb or John Wayned
some commie pinko fascist and there are days when my ambivalence
flips my lifeless wig. Today, I wonder.
Left, right, left, and now your right;
what side am I on? And who cares?
If I’d been born a bomber instead of a boomer; things would be
exactly as they are. Except for this poem. And except for the spelling of this cause or that; how much difference is there between them and me?
Look both ways down the tunnel searching for which religion or cause is worth dying for.
Mind the gaps that may suck you in, or pay you well, because killing for a cause is killing still.
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