On the Move,
March 2003
by james bezerra
We drove east for days.
It always seemed to be the middle of the night.
I learned my body can’t handle
7-11 coffee
and diet Red Bull
in the same two hundred miles.
We woke in a New Mexico motel
as US armor swooped into Iraqi desert
and we sat there,
dumbfounded,
eating Egg McMuffins watching war,
live,
on TV.
Just like that.
No one had ever quite seen that before:
a TV camera on a tank.
We’re so used to it now:
The Forever War.
Anderson Cooper in a desert,
stylish black flak jacket -
makes one wonder if it’s custom tailored
and where do you find a tailor
who works with Kevlar? -
he looks square-y from a bad uplink;
Looks like he’s on safari.
Pink and yellow Tulsa strip club neon shimmies
like a mirage
of a lighthouse
when we pass on the 44 at night.
That’s all I remember of Oklahoma.
New forms of food we found along the way:
White Castle, Waffle House, Cracker Barrel,
Lambert’s Café home of the Throwed Rolls. Fried Okra,
which I thought were chicken nuggets, but which very much weren’t.
Other things we’d never of heard of then:
IED
and extraordinary rendition,
enhanced interrogation,
sectarian violence,
surge and hold,
and Abu Ghraib,
and Green Zone,
and Blackwater,
and Haliburton,
Oscar Mike and
oh-dark-30
and embrace the suck
and hollow armies
and The 80 Percent Solution.
It was harder to find a drink
in the middle west,
but on the same day
I did see
the world’s largest banjo
and its most giant fiddle.
Yakov Smirnoff had a theater then
in Branson Missouri
and on Sundays
they used it as a church.
How do you even measure a war anyway, -
we asked in Hannibal,
trying to skip stones across the Mississippi -
in tons of ordinance? In time?
In pints of blood
or un-beat heartbeats?
In Illinois
in East St. Louis
a guy told me they dig basements
with dynamite.
.
.
.
