The Blasted Afterlife of Paul Baumer

The Blasted Afterlife of Paul Baumer

I still hold my chest with my shaking hand on the arm that didn’t hurt…eyes closed…

Blood black, tantalizing black, glowing through the doors of purgatory…...

I am like everyone else, crying on the ghoulish field…

the whimpers and moans of the wounded and broken…

the horsey wind blew on flesh, that felt like unbearably cold, cut skin, whining like the sound of scratches on pavement...

….feeling like an eye being cut from rusted barbed wire…

but I am not scared… For I hear lost emotion, lost life, and a distant choir.

The choir sings through the sky of doom, so blood, beguiling, black,

And the sky sharpens with a natural dance in the stars, the never so golden stars…

I was here before, I just wasn’t the one before…

I lie dead… I only fell, but it is only the wind I see blown in the field,

so quiet and so still, the shouts, shots, and blood still all remain there,

but there is a shock, it takes me away, lifts me up…

My mind sings, asking, “Is it all over?” But the choir does not respond.

For they are the voices, such lost voices of those,

My loss… It is who they are…

It is only a matter of time that the ghosts and spears of my life…. battle.

I still live, although it’s only in the past, where the ones I lost live now.

A final breath my spirit takes, and my soul wanders aimlessly in the field.