Variation On a Theme by Gil Scott-Heron, by John Murillo

    Near midnight mid-December,
and my junkie uncle, the soldier,
    sleepwalks home.  Up avenues
strewn with everyday debris,
    past rats he imagines man-made
and robot. In his heavy half sleep,
    he palms, barely, a bone knife stolen
from the dead butcher’s meatshop.
    Gris-gris against the bandits
in his head, the hounds at his heels.
    There’s a rumble, now, rising
from behind the old armory.
    A black chopper lifting,
lighting up the block.  It hovers
    like a hummingbird bred for death.
When he points it out to passersby,
    they laugh or look away. He points
again, of course it’s gone.  The one
    good cloud he can still make out
is where his god resides.  That’s
    the good news.  The bad news
is that his god has got three trained
    snipers beaming from a rooftop.
In each one’s crosshairs, uncle soldier
    ducks and staggers.  Early winter,
his breath is bonedust.  Decorated
    war dog whose only friends are ghosts.
But even they, tonight, are elsewhere.

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (forthcoming from Four Way Books 2020).  His honors include a Pushcart Prize, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.  His work has appeared in Plaughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2017.  He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.