Uncle Carnie in the War

Your great-great-great uncle
Carnie as a kid fell out of a tree
onto I think a branch that broke
with such force, it stuck into
his skull. A chum who’d been
chewing tobacco pushed a plug
down into Carnie’s new head
hole. Then, fast-forward to him

at twenty-four with the hole healed,
though not the head, which refused
to grow as strong as the rest of him,
but the caesars of nineteen seventeen
didn’t mind sending a kid who was
backed up inside a man’s body off
to battle. The first he won

the next fall when he got the hell
out of Camp Devens near Boston
before the bomb of the flu epidemic
that dropped a hundred men a day.
It didn’t take long for leaders to learn
Carnie never would turn old
enough to war, so they sent him

home to that huge family that hugged
him back in, and when later ten
million martyrs were done dying for
Franz Ferdinand and twice as many
more buried for the blue in their lungs,
Carnie’s conflict was already over.
After, he still stayed alive until

nineteen fifty-five, when he poured
away elsewhere glad to exit out
through the door in his head
that had never quite closed,
that deep scar against all those
incomprehensible things he saw.