twenty-five.

We are reading the lives
of soldier poets.

It started with a copy of
The Waste Land.
Mine is composed of
17 pages of poem,
263 pages of notes.

This does not include the index.

It does not include the preface, or
the rather disingenuously named
A Note on the Text,
full of remarks that argue there can
be no text, the text is ephemeral.

Do not look for the text,
for you shall not find it.
The text, like all texts,
is a lie.

It contains no cake.

The Note is itself
approximately 61% text, and
39% notes regarding
A Note on the Text.

I tell myself this isn't excessive.
It's a complicated poem,
a poem sung in a minor key
but even the author
would agree that some things, some
existences, are perhaps
too ridiculous to be
named properly as anything but
comedy.

I do not laugh.

It is this strangeness
that leads us to Robert Graves,
to Siegfried Sassoon,
to Wilfred Owen, to the
complicated recollection that is
every soldier who meanwhile
dreamt himself elsewhere.

To the juxtaposition
of mud and blood and rhyme.