As i walked through streets
over puddles of neon,
down shadow-dripped alleys,
with Saigon taxis honking
and swishing in the rain,
phantasmal faces
drifted past,
eyes obscured
under rain-beaded umbrellas,
going nowhere
& nowhere,
all silent in their worlds,
worlds trickling
and oozing away,
each clicking step
ticking away
the irrevocably lost time,
i could think of nothing but Marie.
Marie in the rain,
Marie in the dark
moon-sopped night,
Marie in the clatter-clack,
sweeping metronome wipers
of little cabs.
Through the blue smoke
of clubs and bars,
i saw ruby-fleshed lips
& sad painted skulls
of lost paddy-land daughters,
eyeless,
& smiling
through the barbed wire
phosphorescence
of thwacking rotor blades
& dissolving midnight flares.
i heard the moaning rumble of lovers,
the giggling, thrashings & thrustings
in their moldy body-bag beds.
i saw rivers of blood,
flowing toward a crimson sea
of decapitated armies
that advanced slowly,
slowly
to the beat
of a New Orleans
funeral-march band.
i awoke
with hissing jungle sweat fear
blazing in my malaria-ridden mind.
The naked Chinese girl on the bed
lay melting into the damp sheets,
clutching her pillow in terror
of my battle-scarred eyes.
"I am thirsty, cheri",
she said through her tears.
We were all slipping & sliding
off the earth,
clawing with bloody stubbed fingers
at the wormy graveyard loam
-Terry Young
