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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

- Ernest Hemingway

I avoided the war by giving up
and going mad. I wandered witless
as a cloud, up and down the coasts,
through dust and unused widows.
They stopped asking after my jean uniform
once my face began to crease,
once I more resembled the honored dead
than their lost boys, before blood remade them.

With eyes closed, I could pace
these antique streets, find my way
by click of heel on stone
to my parents' home, long abandoned
in despair of their cowardly son.
I strode instead past strange storefronts
unrepaired, to the familiar stairwell,
the welcome unmarked door.

Under house lights low like
the afternoon sun, we clasped hands
and put the bottle before us.
Between shots, we called out names
of memories that still mark the walls,
of songs and their singers burned bright
with ageless audacity. His men, unlearned
in history, quietly cleared the stage.

Courteously, he refused to remark on
my smooth hands, shameful with disuse.
As he led me to the bare room,
below the first notes sounded, thin,
growing confident. He laid the key
on my now-longing palm and smiled,
already turning away.

My fingers were thick as bass-string,
wrapped around wood. But the flesh
remembers more than fear desires.
Above me, the ghosts bare teeth
and chatter, twirling in time.
The old phrases pass by, bowing
as I bow: furiously, for once fearlessly,
ready for a young man's song.