Why did you place me here?
This field has long been dead.
Nothing grows in poisoned soil…
Crows for me to scare? Indeed!
Seeds can’t find the Earth
between the cracks of clay and dust
The farmers all foreclosed upon
Governments that squandered trust.
Can’t pay your bills with blood that spills
from soldiers shooting guns
No buzzing bees, no shading trees,
No sunshine hits the ground
My time is spent in contemplations,
vacancies of sound.
Yes, it’s true, I scare myself,
impaled upon this pole.
I said I’m sorry, paid my debts,
and with it, lost my soul…

When I was just a boy
My mother said I had a halo…
I’ll tell you about that later.
For now, you mistake my demons for birds
Inconsistencies sting like insects…
Morning dew and evening fog
They circle around my bad intentions
The fog clears, and the moon comes
There are coyotes in the distance…howling
It’s a music of longing
for something you’ll never have…
I know that tune well.
Bats crack the sky, then swoop,
And screech, flying past my head
Return again, black-winged regrets
Death avails what time forgets…

Skeletal trees long since stripped of leaves.
A prison landscape for acrid spirits
Locked in perpetual forward vision
And aggravating blurred periphery.
The crows that do arrive taunt me
The noise they make irritates.
Why should they fear me?
I who am nothing! Who once was
My grandfather told me, “Fear is all perception.”
I know this… I’m not the least bit scary.
Old clothes, moth-eaten and mildewed,
Straw and disproportionate stuffing,
Careless construction, to say the least.
Farthing for a feast as death is food for flies.
Poetic nonsense..
This is how tomorrow dies.
Inside days that never end
Cloth bags for my feet,
A linen sack makes up my face,
Mismatched buttons for my eyes
Threadbare lies, no mouth to cry…

I find myself praying for fire…
Please God…strike me with lightning!
Burn me to ashes
that can be picked up by the wind
Blown into the sky as dust,
as warnings to wicked souls.
Listen to wisdom…
You will be a prisoner of your desires.
A slave to your wants,
and addicted to your needs.
Cherish your freedom and hold fast to nothing.
For now, I’m rotting day by day
Memories crowd at my feet…
I know they are there
Every so often, one of them
slithers up my leg
Like a demonic centipede,
It then crawls into some kind of memory hole…
Until I perceive a body where there is none.

Who placed me here?
What kind of witchery is this?
I remember now…the sun is rising behind me…
Later, it will sink behind the tree line
in front of me when it sets.
I feel nothing, if that makes sense…
no cold, no hot, no bugs, no flies,
or birds picking threads for their nests.
Just a futile existence…
A perceived sense of reality.
This alone, I feel…this torturous nothingness…
It’s overbearing. It’s heavy…
worse than the blackest dawn.
Suffocating oppression
in this forgotten field…

As I was saying, I remember things,
then I don’t, and now I do…
You once saw me as a child… said I had a halo like a saint.
That was my mother…I believe she loved me
better than the others.
It’s what she saw, but it wasn’t the truth.
The halo was a devil.
Masquerading as light…
just like the Bible says.
You think I don’t know about the Bible?
We were taught about it in Sunday school
Later in churches, until I decided not to believe
How could these stories be true?
Little did I realize then…
just because you don’t believe
In something,
doesn’t mean it’s not true…
But I digress…

I wanted my own truth,
And I eventually found it.
Twisted, slanted, skewed,
immoral, as we interpret immorality,
Depraved as we interpret depravity,
I plumbed the depths of self-destruction,
And marked the twain of my lusts
in waves of foolish pleasures.
Hoarding loss as precious treasure.
Caring only for indulgencies,
While instigating tragedy.
Then the war came,
And I was some sort of soldier
My whole focus was no longer
finding truth, but finding death.
Killing in the name of a great cause
that I was never truly committed to…

Empty as this body,
void of feeling, of mercy, of reason…
and only coveting the spoils of war.
I was shot and died in this exact spot,
and immediately, I was inside looking out…
But the war…I wandered with ravenous wolves
who lost sight of what we fought for
Ending in this field of blood.
Fifty thousand bodies here
And am I the only one in hell?
I watched the birds pick at their flesh.

I watched the flies devour as one endless drone

I watched the wild dogs tearing sinew and bones 

and feasting on the honorable dead 

And eventually, I watched the locals
taking the bodies away for proper burials.
Blood plowed under, corn planted
Life prevailing…not mine.

And my body? I never saw again…
but I remember… When I was young
Before I became so jaded.
I remember my father…
He had a portable phonograph
with a loudspeaker
I was five or six years old.
“What are you doing, Poppa?” I asked.
“I’m going to show you
something amazing,” he said.
Then, taking what looked like a 78 rpm record
and placing it on the machine
The needle hit the vinyl
and the scratchy recording of crows
blasted through the field
I can see him now smiling at me…
“Watch the tree line…
Watch the tree line,” he says excitedly.

And then, as if a giant black cloud
arising above the trees, they came…
Hundreds, and then thousands…
crows and more crows.
Their caws are getting louder and louder,
rising higher and higher
Until they filled the blue sky with black
and completely blocked the sun
My father laughed and laughed
But I was scared as I’d never been before
Those crows…those crows were a harbinger
Of things to come.
What I was feeling…it was dread,
But I didn’t know that at the time,
The power of that word…that feeling.

Now the sky is clear
except for one crow I hear…
always the first to appear, he is.
Then his friends arrive.
It’s the same day, yes?
The sun is rising… I’m still here.
How long has it been?
When will it end?
Nothing has changed…
Nothing has changed…
Wait! What’s that?
Yes, another memory
crawling into my head…
Did I mention what my mother said?
That was when I was a little boy, I had a halo?

TM DiSarro