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A HOME WITHOUT A FENCE
Folder:
FAMILY MEMORIES & MEMORIALS I AM A SOLDIER—
Found….
Guilty by association,
Guilty by my uniform,
Guilty by my native tongue.
Fenced in,
Behind a country’s hatred and fear,
Behind a country’s narrow-minded-ness,
Behind a country’s bureaucratic red tape,
When all I want is asylum.
When all I want is to be free.
I AM A MAN WHO HAPPENS TO BE--
A PRISONER OF WAR—
A Prisoner…
Of something you cannot even claim…
To Know,
To Understand,
To Phathom.
I see you, on that other side of barbed wire…
Separating your world from mine.
Yet it does not matter,
Whether I am a German POW in Aliceville, Alabama…
Or a prisoner of my own damned mind…
We neither have a place to return to…
Before the chaos,
Before the suffering,
Before illness and war blew our lives apart…
Like we slept on live grenades.
As a soldier,
There is nothing to return home to…everything lays in ruin…
Beautiful cities left in heaps of crushed rock and debris.
But I do not even know of this truth yet.
Why would I have returned?
As a person,
There is no going back,
Before the diagnosis,
Before the trauma,
Before my birth.
As a soldier,
There is no going back,
Before the fall of my city,
Before the fall of my home,
Before the death of my family,
Before the death of my heart.
There is no turning back the clock.
There is no returning to what once was.
There IS nothing.
War will never end…
My illness will not end…
Isn’t it funny, how a soldier only dreams of home…
When if they knew, in the first place, their own lives ended…
As they knew it.
How good does the electrically charged fence look now?
Their opportunity once there,
Before them,
Around them,
Constantly and always.
As a person…I have
An illness that keeps me locked in,
An illness that constantly contaminates my very being,
An illness that could defeat any enemy,
And I am supposed to fight THIS war…
YET I know what is on the other side…
Of today,
Of tomorrow,
Of next year,
Of the rest of my life…because there is no cure.
And I CANNOT FIND a fucking fence.
