My face?
This ain’t nothing.
I saw infant corpses
Laying in rows
Like raw chickens
In a grocery store cooler.
I saw boys gutted alive,
And I saw the wild dogs at work
Eating them.
I saw young children
With ghastly wounds,
Covered with maggots and flies,
Crying for their Mamas.
I saw brains burst out
Of skull wounds;
I saw an infant trying to nurse
At his dead Mama’s limp breast.
I saw living people
With their faces blown away, limbs,
Stumbling around helplessly,
Close to death.
I saw an odd figure,
A genderless, faceless human
Covered in the black crust
Of a burning,
Yellowish pus oozing out all over,
Glistening in the sun,
Standing prone,
Arms suspended away
From the body.
Standing,
Because it was no longer covered in skin
But an agonizing crust
That easily crumbled.
Standing…
Alive, somehow.
I saw men collect human trophies:
Breasts, heads, penises, hands, toes.
I saw men rape
And sodomize women,
Ripping their vaginas open with knives.
I saw civilians bayonetted,
And finally,
I saw soldiers weep openly
As they fired on crowds
Of unresisting old men,
Women,
Children,
And babies.
The characteristic act
Of men at war
Is not dying.
It is killing.
Poem and drawing by Anna Sea
