Johnny Two Bows

He's fishing trout in icy waters
he's watching snow flakes fall through the ceiling
has the Milky Way for a pillow,
but from his back, he's sweating peanuts
in a ward for seasoned veterans
for the loud and silent screaming
for the terminally burned to a crisp

Tomorrow morning,
he's headed to Las Cruces
where he'll run the marathon
the marathon he should have won last yeat
into the arms of his Dolores
pledged to marry when returns from war
which he shall, but more like toast

He's headed home on an Amtrak
chugging southward to Colorado
to the love of the high plains desert
to sights he's known when he was young
but now the bitch returns with vengeance
it's not Dolores who he's cursing
but the smashed ankle up to his groin

the searing pain of wounded knee
the very leg in action missing,
the one he swore they sewed back on,
but truer is a stump than all a world of wishing.
Thus, Johnny Two Bow insanely tortured
hallucinates to distract himself,
and visits Frost in A-Wishing Well

"A poet would a wishing go..."
but then falls back to shitty combat,
the smell of napalm
in the linings of his nose,
and a philosophical expletive explodes like shrapnel,
for every sorry Dick to hear and feel
"What the fuck is poetry?"

With that, sounds a gong epiphany
like that of feathered ancestors
hooping round him with beating drums,
like a rainbow trout netted on last gulps,
like one more marathon to run before departing
the voice could be of Frost himself ---
It's not so much what you're saying, Sonny

as how you turn a chosen phrase,
and that is poetry, now and forever
as snow flakes darken one by one
and lids sink deeper than any night,
and winds whip out of nowhere,
across the high desert country
of Johnny Two Bows, RIP