We come home to the wire.
Safety in numbers and worn-out shades of camouflage.
We drink from canteens, the blood of soldiers spent
like ammo littered on yellow ground.
We toast them and spill drops of us
to show that we are lost in this land, too.
They are not alone. 

Real men cry within the wire. 
I tell them it’s a sign of 
Strength, Respect, Love for the soldier.
Not the war. 

We leave the wire daily, sometimes for days.
Funny how a wire can separate life from death,
fear from terror—a powerful Almighty in our world.
This desert is dry and cracking like bodies and faces 
where life and laughter were snuffed out by bullets and bombs. 
Pain and struggle remain
and the blood STILL flows. It flows. 
It fills the cracks and disappears
Every Day and Night.

I was QRF. 
My wire became invisible. My God, too. 
Faith became a struggle; hope a dangerous wish. 
I jumped hurdles in my brain,
swallowed fire every night to cleanse, re-cleanse 
my soul with lies. 
We branded flesh with hot metal to feel human, 
not just the monsters they made us.

You can trip a wire in your brain
to bring you right back to war again. 
But that doesn’t replace the home you knew,
the life you want to get back to you. 
The more you trip that wire though,
lights shut off in rooms you know,
and they won’t come back on anymore.
The life you knew is gone.*

Yet, we always come home to the wire. 
March with dirty faces and broken minds
past the field of sunflowers hung out to dry 
with the day’s blood.
Now HOME there is no wire,
only rope to tie the noose. 
Life is not what we had wished for over cigarettes 
and talks of home. 
HOME is not a place to find.
It was the dream and we awoke,
humans and monsters in limbo between foreign 
lands now forgotten. 
And there is nothing here to separate life from death.

* Intended to be spoken/sung in a different tone.