photograph by Tom Daley

After the deployment

After the deployment: hard tack

After the deployment: a text message and an inquiry after rope

Eight and a half years of war and who wouldn’t have seen it?

Their cheeks are all cinched by the whim of zeal with a vocation

Where the crescent moon twitches the legion of bats from the underpass

And ambushes stack their hands on the throats of professors of engineering

And the ally-in-chief considers consorting with the troublemaking mullahs

His lieutenants’ fingers are brittle

From pouring acid on bare thighs of students in miniskirts

This is your adventure, this is what you pulled the lever for

The order of the day is ill at ease

The statistic of the day is the dimensions of the dilapidation

When the helicopter mechanic goes home

he watches cartoons and fights with his wife

On the floor of this moonscape is a carpet dyed in poppy tars

On the carpet, hookahs trademarked “Very Sustainable”

Where both rebel and puppet haggle over brisk brokerages

Whose logos sport variations of a pumped left bicep

Ribboned with blowzy elastic

The crossbars of the logo letters corroded by needle tracks

The deputy to the deputy minister has arranged for the transfer

Of the names of recently discovered planets to mining companies

In twenty years this landscape will be prettier than even West Virginia

And burkah-wearing tour guides will help you don your surgical mask

As the top of the mountain is pulverized with deactivated land mines

All your volunteers organize queues of stumps

All your downstreams run with the effluent of your virtual firefights

All your paper print outs are smiley with the homogenized acres

The forests where pine beetles fence with pepper spray

Your girlfriends wear facial masks moist with the runoff of flash floods

Your boyfriends ink their tattoos with the browns of desert camouflage

A pale walnut, a souvenir of the tobacco stains before the ambush

The grins which were immortalized over forbidden cell phone cameras

In messages never opened by the demobilized comrade

Whose stateside bootheels swing six inches above the forest floor. 

Bio: Tom Daley serves on the faculty of the Online School of Poetry (http://onlineschoolofpoetry.org/) and teaches poetry and memoir writing in the greater Boston area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review, Fence, Barrow Street, Diagram, Rio Grande Review, and elsewhere.  He is the author of a play, Every Broom and Bridget—Emily Dickinson and Her Servants, which he has adapted into a one-man show.