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come here cowboy come here
by spiel

see this virgin soldier boy   stilled in his prime
bagging elbows   coding knees
hey   come here mr. president   come here phony cowboy
come here texas blueblood come here
see this virgin boy counting toes fingers and spines

go ahead if you must  line up for the rapture with your clown hat on
         mr. president
or better yet   come here come here to face this boy
who could not bare his superior officer's stare

so he was demoted from near-nobody to nobody
bagging lips brains and livers for transport back home to the u.s.a.

come here awol cowboy   show this kid your thumbs
the parts of you which prove you could have lifted something greater
than a crawford chainsaw trimming limbs of a less bloody sort
and he will show you bags full of thumb-knuckles tips and fingernails
zip-coded for shipping without really knowing who
nor where they came from

this virgin kid whose virgin sweetheart awaits him back home
this naive boy who bought your bring em on boast
who figured he could prove he was a man   a mighty christian at war
as he watched you pray with your eyes closed

but this boy's feet turned to sand as you waffled on your why
and his girlfriend sent a message that you'd lied and unlike
all his buddies he'd never felt the privilege of his sweetheart's blood
yet here he was all smeared in the blood of thumbs
(not thumbs like yours with tidy fingernails) plus baby's scalps and tiny hands
and too much splintered bone splattered in human dung of young men
just like him

come here come on bigshot-target cowboy   forgive this virgin kid
who cannot stand to face you cannot look you straight eye to eye
be humbled in his presence mr. cowboy without a horse to ride
tell him that you're sorry that you led him so astray
admit you never really had the mandate
though he won't know what a mandate is   he is a simple kid   a no body

do this phony cowboy get down on your knees
sob yourself to bits and pieces
then hope   then beg this kid can spare some space in his bags
to squeeze your fragments  cast astray with other odds and ends
to code them back to general delivery to see if they
 (aside from all this more noble flesh and bone)
just might stand the test for the presence
of human d.n.a.
 


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