Letters from the Front
A Poem
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shane Ryan is an art student from Boston, Massachusetts with a love for both visual and verbal languages. He spends his time either writing or pursuing realism with a ballpoint pen.
your brain is making its repairs, says a therapist heading a council convened tonight around a crescent table, each member of the diet resolute as a marble bust, turning stiffly to her coequals (she pronounces my name to get my attention with a sinister intonation that suggests my file stretches to no end (overhead, an oculus confers the light of a thousand moons and renders all the more striking this council (it casts a divine sort of glow upon the scribe’s paper and his typewriter’s keys (the scribe’s desk floats like the star in the crescent (the dome in which they convene queens the structure of a mind-palace whose rooms are many (you’ll find the hard edges of primary and those doors which hiss on closing, the reinforced walls, the Fire Escape Plan of an aftercare suite (in separate wings, you’ll find bathrooms whose express purpose is either cutting or purging (the father gets a master bedroom and a master bath at whose vaulted corners are fixed trichloroethylene dispensers (with faces like outlets, these gadgets are programmed to spritz a fine mist of agida every thirty minutes (in a rare sleep, he dreams of the park-bench idiot who mutters strange nothings to himself (a puffer jacket ill-adorned, one shoulder concealed, the other not (he scares off the strangers who’d otherwise regard him and give alms (those stars above permeate the night sky (holes gather broadcast (shotgun fired from white without (obliterates the skull that shelters the information and gives it shade (the blonde boy is sent off to General Kendricks Academy, where boys learn discipline, where the heart grows brawn as the body, where the wayward soul finds his path (a trite language but firm enough to echo a kind of Muscular Christianity, some modern form only men of war could understand, bridging the Levant, M14 in one hand, Bible in the other (rec, he tells me, provides a space in which to battle out your ills, to convert the ever-present Need into something more civilian (a space in line with the courthouse, the classroom, the church (the Lyceum of togaed men (four elements (a skull is raised (in another era, soldiers embrace in the trenches, the woman now little more than a chimera, their mortality hovering over them like storm clouds, muddying the battlefield, watering their last-minute boylove (we still keep in contact (he snaps me as if he were sending letters from the front (I think he’s in love with me, but I’m in love with someone else
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