"Listening."
His rage is from not killing anyone at close range,
not seeing the brain splatter.
He says he was trained to murder,
but all he did was ride the Humvee probability.
And off the record, he flipped grenades at villages
by the side of the road and laughed--
bullet littered the land and the vehicles
passing by when his was passing by.
Sometimes he dragged passengers out and mashed them,
without touching the face.
Sometimes when he walks into a gas station,
now that he's back, they greet him--
how are you brother?
And he replies, under his breath,
I am not your fucking brother, you
gas station people are only targets to me.
His is a professional failure.
I empathize.
He works out, but it's in math class that his thoughts wander.
He imagines a trespasser--
how he'd mutilate him and hide the microscopic blood.
He's tearful, hyperventilates.
His mother's shoulder is Siamese with his.
Think of life, I say.
He says, life is short.
I say, short or long, think of life.
Then I go back to my desk where there's a message for me
to call my father.
I call and he says, your sister had penciled something
down in Arabic a while back, splotched now.
I say, I don't want to return to anyone.
I don't want to return to any country
after this long absence.
I want only to return to my language
in the distances of cooing.