The Prisoner

Considering that I'd made it
back and whole and been
given the Bronze Star to return
to Nixon with a note about where
to stick it and was living
by the beach in PG, CA 
with a moss green Sunbeam Alpine
parked out front and would soon
meet Jill who would take me 
to San Francisco but leave in 
three years for Sand City where 
I last saw her grinding on a stage,
her naked ass churning the air
to the delight of a bar full of soldiers
while I went back to Teryl who would
later leave for Paris with Jonathan so
I could go to Tokyo to meet Izumi and
have two kids and be sitting by the 
kitchen window some thirty years later
on a gray day in Kobe watching 
a sparrow with a splash 
of yellow to each wing perch on the bush
edging the lot where two houses
had collapsed in the quake crushing
two old people in their sleep,
where the bird, perched on the bush 
when last I looked, has flown and
considering all that, standing
on that porch in Pacific Grove,
I should have been laughing my ass off
instead of wearing
one mask or another.