Little Pancho Villa

What's a memory that comes back again and again,

and won't ever leave, as if it was pinned to your skin?

There is no past, because time is disordered

so that a moment from long ago can ride with you

loud as a cab driver forced to take the bus.

Worse, what if a memory holds a message

that you spend a lifetime telling it to shut up?

How amazing are we evolved if real trouble

can be left a squawking bird in the sacred now?

We carry our real cowardice without a problem.

It's something we learned to do to live this long.

How many of our best young people die of truth,

and we bury them knowing what killed them,

smug in the manner we can give way in our spines,

to one day reach a ripe old age, all lies gone

slowly silent, as the kids stop listening anyway.

Day 1 of the war I'd never truly fight.

Mostly, I just forgot. Forgetting became a way of life.

Reborn as pancho villa back in third grade one morning

beneath my desk in a duck-and-cover drill.

Sister Mary Joseph explained this is what we'll do when the atom bomb blows us up.
Then, we'll wait for our parents to pick us up.

Bandoleers grew criss-cross down my chest the more I worked it out.

That's a lie! PIstols appeared on both hips as I pictured the cartoon of our town after the devil's own mushroom cloud.
I'd have to peel my way up out of the bricks then make my way home on foot over broken sidewalks and exploded lumber, next to burning station wagons.
Mom and the other kids might already be dead. Or maybe their skin was falling off.

I remember Dad saying how we'd head to the mountains where maybe the air was still clean. As if we could fly.

It was all a lie.

And the danger would never end. We were going to make more  bombs.

There was no one honest enough to stop it. The hell with that! I'll stop it!

Eventually, it was recess, and pancho villa disappeared. But a darkness

got injected into me that would only ever leave if I went to war, a rebel

from the simplest truth: We're going to use those bombs one day.

Is forgetting one of the things we all do like a club rule?

Do we forget the big lies, or did we always expect them?

Are we game players who actually know this one rule that everyone lies can't be broken?

Parents. Teachers. Government. Priests. Bosses. TV news announcers.

Is it that none of us could survive if we were to live in truth,

like it's the greatest single poison on the planet?