Witness0

The little soldier, he stood, five foot seven, pattering up the rocky side of a muddy hill with a bellow of smoke rising behind it. He thought he made out the sound of a trumpet in the wind or the sound of an angel had carried him here but nothing was to be found but dusk and the dark that waits after it. Hurrying up the side he can now see the landscape in its entirety with the wind lifting the dying flags, some singed with warfare and some standing among a rotting pile of the corpses it stands for. The guns and empty shells among empty shells and then the empty bullet shells beside them. Their hollow rings now blown with the wind to the past and buried in a moment of silence. Some soldiers lay under the mud, some reaching for a gun, some with their eyes closed, some hold something small in the grip of their hands, some cry in death and stare at the sky and wonder whether God had really something to offer them after this dirty disarray of humanity or if war was his plan all along. He turns every now and again, hearing a woman call his name, a ring that is not unlike any bullet or any rose, a voice he rises to meet only in his heart, a voice that travelled him 75 miles out of any comfort in lands he has no business occupying in a muddy bloody rotten corpse filled frost ridden hell having man bashing bone clashing vision of a future only we created for ourselves, oh so lovingly and willingly. He avoids the bones of the dead men in his path, they felt enough destruction. He only looks for a face. Maybe some color in it, with wholeness intact. Where the fever of a rotting injury or the slow bleed of mans creation hadn’t created another burial but it was all around him, how could he hear a voice so angelic in a field where men stab and thrash until the other ceases to see and remember. Men who built dreams to sustain themselves and nurture their longing for the undead, their longing for a laugh with a brilliant woman in a fancy hotel bar room or smoking in a cigar lounge with his best man the night before his wedding day. They left it all, to prove a point. What point is there for him to prove now? The battle is over. All faith is lost. All men are dead and have carved themselves out a landscape for the feeble to cry over and whither at the thoughts of such horror and he carried around his neck a bottle. A tiny flick of glass with a wooden screw on top for the sake of being sacred. He may have a message to save for her and he may not. There it is again, the voice, calling from the north over the sea of final release. Eyes staring at the sky lifelessly as if their last thoughts may not have been as harmful as the blood pouring out of them. Their dreams of children and wives and living life so freely as to pick up a basket of oranges and milk on the way home in the grocery store, every memory of mother and father, every love, every significant touch, every memory forgotten but stored beneath their fingernails and their filthy habits, it all lives in the mud now. In the graves that are dug for them in the country from which they came. The truth is the lives they lived are still the truth and cannot be ignored. Men with the capability to kill were already killed. Some in their wake, some in their daydreams and some in their nightmares but they were killed and everyone is killed at least once or twice by themselves. There are dreams that are meant to. Yet we dream on. We step on lazy and broken carousels if it means itll be the only horse to carry us home and so we spin round and round in that lazy way that we hope for something meaningful to happen. There it is, the voice again. Her name. He almost caught it and his jar was open and his jaw was allowing the air to pass through. He wanted to taste the sound of this angel and carry it home. The mud had gotten too high for him and the blood had a stench like shitting pennies he had for breakfast and he wish he could feel a warm embrac- no. He has to search for it. It calls him in this dying climate. Then the bullets pick up speed and move past him. He is out in the open and braces for cover. The metal smacking and clanging against the already dead bodies, sending flesh like shrapnel and bones reemerge into the war and the souls of the dead men that surround him just wish for silence but are propagated by the ache of the very thing that ended them. His nightmare is reawakened but a nightmare he needs to live eternally. Yet through every flint of cheap metal that buzzes past him like a bumblebee, he aches to hear her name in the wind with some breath and beauty, to remind him to continue forward. That war is all a bad dream and the feeling of longing is designed to keep only sacred wars intact, the sacred war of man vs himself. Nature and love do not coincide. One is always trying to remove the other. Nature decided that love was too welcoming and gave it an expiration date and we all abide without choice or fight but what about the ones who died before they enter the battlefield and what about the ones who die after. Ricochets reflect from his immediate surroundings and damn nearer to him with every shot. He waits and waits for the sound of her calm, her scent to erode away the fear of his finality and if that’s all love had to offer, he made peace with that. So he accepts that the thought is enough and hands dig out from the dirt underneath him, her hands, with her warmth and her century, an ultimatum only he can give himself at this moment in time, the glass jar on his chest opens and pulls in the black mud riddled with love and death and collapses onto the surface. As the soft hands of grace pull him into the ground, he can see faces of many dead men and women, singing so bright and aware that the top of the bottle burns with smoke rising from the top and it burns the dirt underneath it. The truth about every man is it will end for all of us and some would like to decide where and when and how or find the opportune moment like laying in bed with loved ones or in a comfortable hospital room also surrounded by loved ones but the real truth is that men will die for just a glance of appreciation. Once men die that very first time, some stay dead and some learn to live again.