“BATTLE GROUND”
by Gabrielle Faust ©2010

I want to bring myself to the foreground
Of my own existence,
To feel the weight of the firearms
Selected by my commanding officer,
And the army that flanks me to either side,
Resting heavily in my sweat stained palms,
To smell the scent of blood and mud,
The perfume of smoke and terror and fury,
Feel the kind of adrenaline fueled by the
Instantaneous realization of mortality
Pounding in my temples until I think
I might hemorrhage my devotion
Into the cavern where my heart once beat,
The ubiquity of a serialized monotony
Seared away from my soul in the singular
Moment of survival and the perfect,
Osmotic symbiotic pride in a devotion to
A common enemy, a common goal
To rise above the fray and survive,
Beyond the war instrumented by forces
Greater than the sum of our parts,
Vaster than the scope of universal recognition
That we are not tethered to a destiny
Preordained by our ancestors’ flat footed footsteps,
Nor omnisciently orchestrated by the gods,
But free to cultivate a new world order as
It pertains to the singular tense of “I”,
The ego, the vanity, the self,
The oppressed oppressor,
The hero and the victim awaiting rescue,
Yes, I want to bring myself to the front lines
Of this war that has waged on for
A seemingly endless eternity of
Inconsequential instances strung together
Like miles of barbed wire slowly rusting
In rain from a Wizard of OZ tornado sky,
A chattering maelstrom of ineffectual nonsense
That threatens my homeland now,
The one plot of earth I have come to
Suddenly understand as sacred and unconquerable
In a way no fortress of man-made hands
Could ever be.

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