1.

I met a boy on the boardwalk
hitting a hoop with a stick.
The harder he hit the hoop,
the faster rolled the hoop.

The boy on the boardwalk I met
played a game with hoop and stick,
but his expression held no joy.
Serious work this was

to hit and hit and hit and hit
the copper hoop along the boardwalk,
as necessary as a caning
of the welt-bright world

for a theft it did not commit
or if it did then out of hunger.
His expression troubled me.
I almost thought it anger.

I met a boy on the boardwalk—
what I thought was a boy, from afar—
until he got a little closer
and I could see he was a giant

his hoop the woe-spoked Wheel
his violence the shocks
that keep it turning, keep it crushing
currencies, towers, forests, people

like me and you on opposing shores
turning to each other
opening our mouths
just in time to let some light out,

lighthouse crying out to lighthouse.

 

2.

You want to sit across a table with the God
of war and gamble. Only he
is there to eat, and what he eats is meat.

Materialschlacht. In German memoirs
Americans only advance
after dumping hours of ordnance on a spot.

New boots press noiselessly the still-hot ash
as GIs pick among the tree stumps
shooting man stumps.

“War of materials.” Memos from Albert Speer
three years before the end
tap the gauges of the dreaded war machine,

needle after needle in the red.
In Naples, in a memoir, GIs offer
Campbell’s soup cans to a row of mothers

instructed to appear without their toddlers.
There on the cobblestones, among the pigeons,
they lie down, make the trade.

The dream today is of a drone fleet,
fearsome dragons, agile falcons, dragonflies
all juiced on rare earth heart-grit

so that a goldfinch intricately hinged
might flutter up a tank gun
and detonate its charge,

a kamikaze with no pilot in it,
a sacrifice without a burnt offering.
But the God of war will not go vegan.

The God of risk insists you wager.
You want to play for mere materials.
He sees your materials and raises you men,

And when you fold and turn to flee,
you find a commissar is waiting
with a pistol, NKVD

with orders straight from Stalin,
shoot anyone attempting to retreat.
Time to wager. Have a seat.

 

3.

Savior salvo
Alpha bravo.

Velvet kevlar
Beebalm napalm,

Desert razor
Sterilizer.

Helter skelter
Charlie delta,

Bunker buster,
Roof of tin.

Play them memes and
Play them mayhem:

Agile vector,
Alpha Victor,

Ear eye voodoo
Echo Zulu.

Easy does it:
True, or was it?

Foxtrot Whiskey
Fog of War,

Die onscreen
Then die some more

While our box seats
Cheer the score,

Die for clicks,
Die for Lockheed,

Papa Papa
Pvt. Proxy

Guarding freedom’s
Pillwhite poppies.

Someone summoned
Northrop Grumman,

Stinger hustlers
Homing in:

Six clicks east
Acquire target,

Teach their kids and
Free their market,

Pepsi, Pharma,
Exxon, Ag,

Papa Foxtrot,
Plant the flag,

Fake the protests,
Break their shit,

Tango India,
Tag, you’re it.

 

4.

Invoke at your own risk risk you cannot arm against:
A hymn to the war God is also a charm against.

An invocation is a provocation, a dare inviting
Kartikeya to incite, excite the fighting,

Though if it must be borne, it must be said,
And rhyme can leaven even the blackest bread.

Maxim gun, Murugun, Kumara, artillery,
God in the foxhole, acid in the artery,

At once the crater creator God, original sin,
And the runes of ruins truths are written in.

False righteousness, every instant our eleventh hour—
It ought to be a scandal Skanda has this power,

An even bigger scandal that we gave it him.
Instead of sons I offer up this hymn.

 

5.

In his left hand, a copper kalasha,
In his right hand, a Kalashnikov,
The war God is armed, armed like a warhead,
An arms dealer: Arms and the God I sing.
His third hand holds a ceasefire agreement.
His fourth hand flicks a lighter.
The war God stands at arms, a spokewheel
Of arms: Firearms and the God I sing.
In his fifth hand, a lotus flower.
In his sixth, a thermonuclear blossom,
Incarnation of Hiroshima, passionflower
Turned to ascetic ash he smears on his arms.
His seventh hand holds a pen like a knife.
His eighth hand holds a missile like a pen
Signing an arms deal, signing a suicide pact,
Signing a letter of last resort to send undersea.
In his ninth hand, a conch shell dribbling crude oil.
In his tenth, a skull with seagull eggs in its eye sockets.

 

6.

Krieg is the name of the eagle that eats
Prometheus lashed to the sacrificial crag.
Jung is the psychosis that the Viet Cong
Conjured in those they hunted in the jungle.
Yuddha is the yaksha you must vanquish
Before you can become a Buddha.
Zhenzhang and senso: sibling syllables
Balanced in battle, yin and yang.
If you listen closely to a language
You start to hear the history of its anguish.
From French to English traveled guerre to gore.
A single root bequeathed us word and war.

 

7.

I do not wish fear on my enemy.
I do not wish pain on my enemy.
Only chaos.
Chaos is a friend of mine.

Two scorpions under a glass bowl
Keep their pincers up like surgeon’s hands.
Three monks shout a point of faith
Into a point of honor.

Inflict no fear. Fear will unite them.
Inflict no pain. Pain will unite them.
Chaos makes one enemy
Many little enemies

All enemies with one another—
An Era of Warring Kingdoms,
Mayfly dynasties
Coalescing, convulsing, raining

No longer than a summer shower
After which the gnats come out
In shiftless shifting clouds
Dissolved by nightfall, snacks

For the swallow, building
Nothing, stinging
Nothing, swarming
Nothing, nothing.

 

8.

grasshopper jostles grasshopper brushes grasshopper knees grasshopper

until their backbent legs shiverclick their heads jerk in widdershins saccades

brittle chitin bodies crack and selfstrange insects shrieking hatch

through their own skulls with dazzle-yellow markings outsize swinging jaws

razor-zigzag that would slice the nipple off what suckled them

locusts birthblind wetwinged tortured by their angerhunger swarming rising

smokelike to kill and eat the color they once were

strip the bark off trees the shirts off men the husk the stem the root the seed corn

stripped starvation’s missionaries spreading everywhere the gasp and scalpel

plague and congregation a single aerosolized chainsaw

mindless or else remotely guided battening where

steered with tiny chips behind those sector-scanning lenses pinging

distant servers satellites a mobile unit thirty clicks away

where everything each locust sees is on a realtime screen

the plague descending on these intricately jointed fiberglass

wings to eat the sheathes off cables eat the insulation

then the wires all the way down to their stems of sweet copper

locusts funneling into the scrambled fighter’s turbines pouring

kamikaze down the naval guns that rise and swivel

toward everywhere the swarm its agile mandibles

programmed for destruction infinite appetite a hole

a hell a throat a womb that only holy war can fill

 

9.

Here, Skanda, is a poem with no love in it
But you love most what isn’t given in love,
You with your collection of legs and arms.
I live in a country safe between two oceans.
And yet it’s not the oceans but the navy on
The oceans that protects me. Scuttle it
And this second nation goes the way of the first.
Our worship takes the shape of warships. Warhead
In the silo, lingam in the temple,
Ramstein Air Force Base our Angkor Wat.
Strange, we Americans profess we hate you
When we have been your maddest missionaries.
We praise the peace that you have blessed us with
As if it were somehow opposed to you
And not the fruit of our ferocious
Devotion to you. Every arms deal spreads
The oldest of religions in the latest
Revelation: heat-seeking, heaven-seeking,
Laser-guided, spirit-guided, reverenced
Through violence. One mandala was Laos,
Burnt offerings of teak trees, mud huts, bodies,
The fire at its heart immortal napalm.
We still engage in human sacrifice,
And clearly it still pleases heaven. Pleases
You, oh Lord, oh Warlord. Here you go. Svaha.