Veteran's Day - November 15, 2022 at Open Mic Surgery, Never Ending Books
Channel: Poetry for Cowards
Date: 16/11/2022

Veteran’s Day 

They waited until all the grandfathers were dead, 
laying in the ground, full military honors; 
the trumpet player from the local division 
playing Taps as they lower all their caskets 
into the ground they’d enlisted to protect; 
the folded flag, handed off to our distant aunts 
and the Catholic “Our Father” being invoked –  
our Congregational backgrounds accidentally continuing with 
“For Thine is the power and the glory, forever and ever.” 

They waited until our grandfathers were dead, 
the ones who came back from Italy, silent and steadily 
building machinery for the world to grow out of the 
places we asked them to destroy – to stop the  
threat of a world where we could be arrested for thinking dangerous thoughts 
sent to die for dressing like a girl if we were supposed to be a boy, 
stripped naked and hanged for kissing a man, and stroking their hair through our fingers, 
put on trains and gathered together and shot into pits for 

All the grandfathers who only knew 
that they were killing to defend America and England and France, 
to discover, later, that they had shot and stabbed 
and dodged and hid 
to save people they probably didn’t even like; 
Faggots and Commies and Jews, 
who would be strangely grateful to our grandfathers 
for the rest of their lives. 
Which is why they waited until they were dead 
to start picking the peeling shellac from the pews 
and taking the plastic off the furniture, 
sold their Hummel figurines on Ebay 
and took the doilies off the side table. 

They told their children that racism was over 
after MLK and Woodstock and that it was  
Unions that destroyed the middle class in the ‘70s; 
that music will never get as good as Pet Sounds, 
throbbing fists to Bachman Turner Overdrive in a  
1988 Pontiac Bonneville because America won and 
all the problems were over and it was our fault 
for not being happy and the gay’s fault for fucking 
that monkey in Africa and “black-on-black violence” and 
Morton Downey Jr. and the Soviets fell and  
America won and McDonalds stopped using Styrofoam 
and Crystal Pepsi Billy Joel songs about them 
because they won because Vietnam was hard but  
support the troops in Iraq and America is  
fine now we defeated racism America is fine now 
we won we won we won we won we won. 

They waited until all the grandfathers were dead 
to get annoyed that we were still complaining 
because my friends are drowning in deep pools of their Victory. 
Hugo Boss traded in for Gildan Vistaprint witticisms, 
brown shirts exchanged for red hats, 
Riefenstahl replaced with YouTube, Mein Kampf 
tweets in their burger drive-through oil-pools in the parking lot minds. 
 
They waited until our grandfathers were dead 
because they would not have survived the drunken slap 
across their ears, the dull throb of their anger; 

because they had ben waiting all this time 
to scream at the grandfathers who’s gallon jug of Gallo 
was half-empty by the plush recliner; the dint 
of pale wan blue, illuminating their stoic, dead faces, 
snoring in the seven p.m. air, the lilt of their surrender; 
the oblivion they prayed for, mixed with the promise of  
a better world for their children, who watched their fathers  
defend a pillbox turret in suburban shires, 
tell them that the right hair conditioner and  
the right Brillo pad and the right neighborhood and the  
right college and the right job and the right woman 
and the right car and the right house would 
mean everything was right and how dare anyone say 
different when grandad is guarding a scrapbook in the attic 
and won’t tell you how he got those German binoculars, so  
you’d better be right, too, until Right becomes the only 
direction because if it’s all a lie then our grandfathers 
came back scarred and drunk and haunted and ignored us 
for the television and booze for nothing and we’re  
suddenly nothing more than a bunch of suckers and rechts. 

They waited until our grandfathers were dead 
and now there is no way for them to heal 
except to believe the world that was sold to them 
will not disappear in the nuance of a wider glance 
across the world that loves them but is not  
beneath them; the pain will never disappear, and 
it will now become our responsibility to gently 
hold their hands through the bristles of an 
overgrown wood of unkept promises, the 
barbs scraping against our skin and theirs, 
as we sit them in a patio chair and 
begin to weed. 

They waited until our grandfathers were dead, 
laying in the ground, full military honors 
to tantrum and rage at a world they had never seen; 
a world they were horrified to discover; 
a world that was not – as they had been told  
in the sitcoms and car ads and the talks at the table –  
theirs.

- Brian Ember