War when you'll bleed to death

In this dream a man was shot. The life-blood left him quickly and he lost all control. Entropy, I guess, took it from there. I watched this, in dreaming, with something like horror, with something like sorrow, all masked in a miasma of hazy slumber. As I awoke, the haze peeled back like the skin off a grape, to reveal naked horror, sorrow. I lay in my bed staring out at twin peaks, and houses cemented into green hills.

Then I turned on the news.
Darfur, Bagdad, Myanmar, West Bank, Syria. China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Guatemala, North Korea, Iraq, the United States. Kurdish rebels, Jan Jueid, Hutu, Tutsy, Talma Tigers, Algerians, Sudanese. Illegal immigrants, In-prisoned monks, Pro-democracy activists, Insurgents. Black water, Chevron. Including ten children, Including seven women, including thirty civilians. An American Soldier here and couple more there.

And one in Mosul one late and gray spring morning in 2003. His was the 100th to die since the beginning of this freedom war. This war that has since served only to freed thousands souls from their bodies, free children from their mothers, free families from their ancestral homes. He was Chris Gelineau, a fellow student. 23. I knew him, I knew his wife, a Romanian immigrant and student of English. So I drove to his funeral, from Vermont to Maine, four hours through forests emerging from their slumber to put green flesh upon their branching bones. Bittersweet: all this resurrection, for Chris I knew there would be none. He was not coming home to his wife. He would never see the shoots of spring, the falling of many colored autumn, he would not see this world anymore.