Dead Soldier

Where the living are, no one's missed him yet.
The best of them
                            will sing themselves to sleep.
The others laugh too loud and swallow pills
until their wet cells burst
                                      beneath the skin like grapes
or bloom like urchins in a Luke-warm sea.

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High above,
                    the green moon glows in a windy sky
like a half-dead cat and its one good eye.

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And who will coin his eyes,
                                          and who would care?
He who failed in school has failed again. And he
who slept last night in a narrow bed
                                                        will sleep in tents of sand
with the collapsing dead.

Copyright © 2006 Kevin Prufer All rights reserved
from The New Republic
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission