Dispatches

from the Border

of Night and Day

This is where I always 

come to.

Just beyond the battle,

clutching my pillow

like an empty automatic

dissolving in my hands

as my drama

becomes

its gradual farce.

A scattering of stand-ins

make for the hills

as again I am

deserted and

left for dead.

Except I’m not dead

because I always

manage to crawl out,

if only

half alive.

So rather than be drafted

I learned to enlist.

Sometimes I fall in love

not knowing that at dawn

I will never see you again. 

Next life? But

a next life never comes.

Only the shadows

of those I thought 

were real.

What if we could live

without this rift

between us? 

Or at least I try

and imagine so.

Until none of it 

is or will ever

be true again.

I keep telling myself

the sun comes up

as the moon goes down.

But that isn’t right

because for a time

 both occupy

the same sky

like familiar strangers.

That makes more sense.

I need more light.

Again and again

I wake up

 dying

or am I

falling asleep

in order for 

another

to live?

Either way

we are twins

destined to

slowly forget

each other.

For instance, 

I forget I live

in a tower

and not the room

of a crying child.

Once I played

with soldiers

in a sandbox.

Now I’m digging

a trench on a beach

to bury his memory.

Its the only way

I know how to grow.

Even the stars 

pinprick my thin skin.

In the same way

mirrors never

make me feel

less alone.

Why don’t they?

But night has its uses

and so does sleep.

Every night I ask myself

who has passed down

this story of surrender?

And why is the protagonist

always killed off 

in mid-stream

like a thief

smuggling rations

to the front? 

Every night is a war

no one ever makes it out alive.

Or do they?

Now, here at the border

between night and day,

I am a twin separated

by the birth of

the other.

This poem,

my last letter

from the front.

Peter Valentyne

June 25th, 2020