Nice little-- you know that helped.
I was looking for some type of you know, that's cool.
Right on.
I'd like to read three more.
We can get on that?
All right.
I ask people to bring tomatoes and stuff.
So you got them, I'm ready.
So just throw them man.
When I was in Mosul, when we returned at one point,
we were called up, there was a roadside bomb called.
And we were called in to make a security cordon around that.
And I remember watching this guy--
we had helicopters on station.
There were snipers up on the rooftops.
I had my guys pulling security.
I was pulling my own security.
My boss doing his-- we're all doing our job.
And I watch this explosive ordnance guy,
an EOD guy put on this crazy suit with a tether
and walk down the street to deal with--
like up close and personal.
The tether is there because if it blows up,
they had to pull back in whatever was there left.
You know?
That's crazy courage.
You know what I mean?
And this poem starts from that, it's called "Katyusha Rockets".
The 107s have a crackling sound of fire and electricity,
of air rustled heat, and when they
pinwheel over the rooftops of Hamman al Alil,
they just keep going, traveling for years over the horizon
to land in the meridians of Divisadero Street, where I'm
standing early one morning on a Memorial Day in Fresno,
California.
The veterans parade scattering at the impact, mothers
shielding their children by instinct,
old war vets crouching behind automobiles as police
set up an outer cordon for the unexploded ordinance.
Rockets often fall in the night sky
of the skull, down long avenues of the brain's myelin
sheathing, over synapses and the rough structures of thought,
they fall into the hippocampus, into the seat of memory.
Where lovers and strangers and old friends
entertain themselves, unaware of the danger is headed their way,
or that I will need to search among them.
The way the bomb disposal tech walks tethered and alone
down Divisadero Street, suited-up
as if walking on the moon surface
as a crowd watches just how determined
he is to dismantle death, to take it apart piece by piece.
The bravest thing I've ever seen.
And I ask a question of you guys tonight.
Because the bombs that exploded--
and I said this in class today, I think.
The bombs that explode in Iraq, in some way
do they not also explode among us?
You know?
And if they aren't, why?
And who among us will dismantle those bombs?
At some point we have to stop diplomacy
by the end of a muzzle.
At some point we have to sit down and talk.
You know?
And I wait patiently for the answer to that question.
You know?
I get wrapped up in the minutia of detail.
I have my Jeep to fix.
I have my bills to pay.
And it's easy to get wrapped up.
There are people dying in Iraq, right now.
This war is not history.
This is happening.
You know?