Alan Catlin- Three Poems

Midnight Cowboy

What was he thinking, really?

This celeb doctor drawn to

tropic island, hurricane wasteland,

disaster area. Expressed motive was

for, “Humanitarian Reasons” though

his I-phone blogs, with pictures,

suggested otherwise, suggested

something like extreme human

misery slumming, getting down

and dirty with the natives and their

open wounds, suppurating sores,

swollen bellies, all nearly naked 

and pestered by horse flies and

mosquitoes, dysentery and disease.

Somehow he neglected, forgot?,

to bring his black bag, medicinal

remedies, tools of his trade.

Pressed into actual service, his only

instrument for dire amputations,

a hacksaw, aspirin for anesthesia,

placebos for everything else.

Suddenly, his blog posts became

less frequent, less self-important, 

no pictures for: typhus, cholera, dengue.

General power failure, cell towers

down, no signals come in or go out;

no reception, nothing.  In the thick

of it all, what to do? Where to begin?

Women on the Edge of Time

Relief work wasn’t supposed to be

like this: no social worker class,

textbook, field research, prepares you

for a land beyond hope, without moral law,

recourse or redress.  Multiple rape victims

freaking out seeing on-the-loose abusers;

all still threatening, smug, recharged and ready.

Field notes indicate female subjects are

often totally hysterical, inconsolable, self-destructive.

No drugs to bring them down, no palliative care.

Nothing to mollify in this place where no one

was ever meant to be. After initial observations,

one dead the next day. Another the day after.

How could anyone understand such pain?

Hell in a Very Small Place

                                    “If you put in enough hours in bars, sooner or later you get

                                    to hear every imaginable kind of bullshit.” C.K. Williams

                                                “We weren’t in the position to disobey

                                                a direct order. None of us were.

Not in the field.  And there was nothing

ambiguous about the order either,

‘Kill everything that moved.’

Everything meant everything, son.

You think My Lai was an aberration?

Hell, that shit happened, like all the time,

Man, every day.  Saw it with my own

two eyes. You send out a bunch of

nineteen and twenty year old, fresh-from-

basic, sacred shitless kids, with only one

thought left over in their minds from six

or eight weeks intensive training in hell

and that’s ‘Kill Kill Kill’, sure as shit, when

the opportunity arose, yeah, they killed

everything that moved. It’s not like there is

a whole lot of time for critical thinking

when some senior guy in the squad starts free

firing into a Ville and the first Looie flips

his Bic and all of a sudden everything’s going

Burn Baby Burn ….well, you get the picture;

“Platoon” without the sad music.

Later on, you know, when guys had some

time to like absorb what had come down, 

to really think about shit, they felt like remorse,

and got all crazy and shit, only natural,

I guess. Made for some really bad mojo in

the squad that’s for sure.  Lot of those guys

didn’t make it. I’m not saying they got fragged

and shit, but, like who checks which direction

the fatal bullets are coming from, who like really

cares? Can’t prove dick, anyway. Lot of guys

that made it out, they adjusted, man.

They did their job and later on, if they cracked up,

well, that’s not the Army’s problem, is it?

Not my problem neither.  To be honest with you,

I kind of liked it: no rules, no regulations and

all the ammo you’d ever need; it doesn’t get

any better than that.”