Oil Beneath The Sand

He couldn't understand his failures

It was as though ashes were falling from the sky

Intent on burying his pathetic attempt to build

To reach

To move

Nothing would load

Why would a god that called himself a shepherd

Allow so many to wander lost

It was a question that many would toss at the devil

But these kinds of thoughts served no-one

And no-one would ever see his greatest accomplishment of all

But it didn't matter

He closed his eyes again

Allowing himself to feel nothing more than the buzz of the booze

Feeling himself slip into the void

Every night a voice from another world

Would call him from a fitful sleep

A world of smoke and blood

Burning tires and shouting men

Pulling him into a nightmare where a cell phone lit up the sky

With burning steel and ball bearings

A world of sand and the sounds of bullets singing past your head

Supersonic,  stereophonic,  madness

The smell of gasoline and rubber burning

Choking your eyes and throat

The cries of your brothers trapped in a medieval sandcastle

Where life seemed to have stopped in the fifteenth century

Did enough people die to keep the oil pump flowing

How many did it take

Sheets wrapped around his thighs

He kicked out and threw his legs to the floor

He could feel his finger still trying to pull the trigger

Yanking on the steel that wasn’t there

He could feel the barrel burning his hand

Searching  the floor for another clip

Falling from the edge of the bed when the sound of a oil barrel exploding

Pulled him back to the day he signed up

The few

The proud

The defenders of the faith

The defenders of SUV's, Baseball, and Rock and Roll

The defenders of the oil

Those people didn’t give a shit about that

We gave them weapons and they killed us with them

Great plan

Great fucking plan

Oil beneath the sand

Who knew it would lead to this

Shaking in a dark room

The smell of oil smoke in his nose

Morpheus pulling his veins apart

Crawling under the bed

Digging through debris under the Humvee

Lightning cracking through the clouds

Rain tapping on the window like bullets on sheet metal

Oil dripping from the sky

Burning when it hits the ground

He pulled himself up from the floor

And made his bed

Pulling on his boots he thought

Today's going to be different

I'm going to lay off the hooch

Stay off the dirty boogie

His right hand trembled

A synthetic vibration

A sympathetic realization

Who's  gonna be my shepherd

God…are you out there

He wiped the sleep from his eyes

Slapped his thighs

Time to roll

Time to rocket

He pulled his keys off the hook by the door

Grabbed his helmet

And with the smell of oil smoke still burning in his nose

He hit the road

Time waits for no man

Time

Like the oil beneath the sand

AWWhitford

8/12/2012