Hello to the one that got away. From the blistering battle unscathed. Without a scar on your head or in. I wanted to tell you we knew we couldn’t win. We knew that from the start, deep within our hearts, but you decided to depart. You were dressed in white, preparing for the fight, but when the colors turned red, you turned around and fled.
You were supposed to stand by your fellow man, but you wouldn’t even take my hand. No you just ripped up your sacred armband, you just turned around and ran. The symbol we brandished was supposed to keep us together. Through the storms and the nastiest of weather. Many of our men fell with the symbol abound, but you let yours fall to the ground.
My father told me go on my son. Your future won’t have that much fun, but don’t desert them. Don’t turn and run when you hear the reapers coming out of the enemies’ gun.
I hear you were surfing on those sunny waves. While mothers and fathers buried their sons in shallow graves. They didn’t even have a choice and now they hear the preacher’s voice. While they lay in wooden beds, feeding the flowers with the fuel of the dead, because they were poisoned by hollow point lead.
You smiled that big smile, gibbering, jabbering all the while. Telling the men how many corpses you’d have on a pile. If only they could have smelled your little white lies. Maybe then they wouldn’t have looked so surprised when you cut off all your brotherhood ties and left them all to die.
I must now say that even I was swayed to believe you were once a man so brave. That idea made me more ashamed, as the Agent Orange was sprayed. We did not make this war, our fathers did. But does that give Uncle Sam the right to blow his lid? To pack us up in sardine cans. To ship us off to a foreign lands. So that we could fight a war that no one could stand. You didn’t want to be there and neither did I, but that’s what we get for eating that American pie, and when that stuff hit the fan, you turned around and ran. Was that your plan?
A medal, a medal, my sanity for a medal as my brothers fell around me like picked off flower pedals. My stomach will never settle, the shrapnel in my brain makes me go off like an overheated teakettle. I think I saw you once before, was it you or a stranger that slammed that door? You said I was crazy and not to bother you anymore. So I knocked on your door never more.
I just wanted to settle some juvenile score. The type you see in some ancient lore. Where enemies that were once friends clash their swords. Till one of their ends comes when the blood pours. I remember seeing you once again, you were writing a check with your golden pen. Did I go up to you? It was you that I sought. I did not because like so many times before you would’ve left me to rot.
You were rich, I was poor, you loved life, I couldn’t take it anymore. Let me tell you that was a hard pill to swallow, but I see you were like the bullets, also hollow. I may go and disappear, my stance might fall like tears, but you will never escape that crippling fear. That your lying cancerous web, will spread and soon your past will rear its ugly head. So say goodbye to the man you once knew, because I know we will see each other very soon.
