i met a girl once
who told me she had a boy
with a war set in the crooks of his lungs
and vocal cords, the perfect mix between
a hippie and a marxist,

with fire in his eyes the size of hammers
and coal, a manifesto of cold stares and
the distant histories of hiroshimas, nagasakis
and normandys-

words stuck on the thickest
parts of his lips, sealed in the cracks
with democracy and deity, hitlers
and stalins and mussolinis,
the pawn of the highest pedigree.

but he had his own soviets, americans
and europeans, she said:
the calluses, muscles, of his own skin-
the finest of cells of the working class,

the bone and the brittle of worth and vice,
entitlements accompanied by the ache of

the bitten, copper tongues of liberty.