Thank You for Your Service
I don’t know if I ever tol’ you this, but back in the day I went on a t-ball trip to Vietnam with the USO to entertain the troops. I traveled with some Hollywood stars, comedians, other entertainers like Henry Kissinger. Anyway, my group included Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda, and a hologram of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mister President.” We called ourselves the Tit Offensive—well, the women did. If I called us that, Susan and Jane “fixed my tie.” I think you know what that means. We had a heavy metal band touring with us—the boys were really into heavy metal over there—called ‘Led Museum,’ maybe you’ve heard of them. Sort of a ‘Led Zeppelin’ on steroids. I’m still deaf in one ear after all these years. You might remember their biggest album, ‘Flabby Road,’ which was a bunch of anti-war songs about old fat white men sending their sons into battle. Maybe you’ve heard their biggest hit, ‘In Arms Way’? About trying to charge the enemy but tripping over all the blown-off arms in the way? A classic. Anyway, I would set my pole up on the stage and give a half-hour clinic on t-ball moves. The GI’s loved it! They were waiting for “the tits,” of course, so I was kind of like foreplay for 3000 randy doughboys while they got all hot and bothered. They really enjoyed the joke. They’d yell and throw things—rotten fruit, fresh fruit, batteries. All in good fun, of course. Anyway, all this came back to me today because I got a letter from the DOD thanking me for my service. The weird part is, it was sent to my family because the DOD thinks I’m dead. According to ‘the Gummint’ (troops from Alabama pronounced ‘government’ that way, usually because they were lacking several front teeth), I’d died at Dien Bien Phu when a t-ball pole fell on my head and cracked my skull open. (You know the military—$30M for a fighter plane but they can’t set up a decent t-ball pole!) Anyway, all that was true, but I recovered quite nicely at Walter Mitty Hospital when we got back stateside. In fact, that was precisely when I started to write poetry. One morning while convalescing I had the epiphany that poetry was exactly like t-ball! (Maybe you’ve read my essay on the subject.) I don’t remember much about the accident, but evidently the pole crashed into my frontal lobe and they’d had to put a plate in my head—which seemed to liberate the flow of words from my mind to my pen! Or word processor. (I call it my “hot plate” for heating up poems.) But here’s the kicker: they’ve awarded me a Purple Heart AND added my name to The Wall in Washington! So my question is, can you be prosecuted for impersonating a soldier after you’re dead, even if you’re still alive? Also, can you pawn a Purple Heart? Maybe Antiques Roadshow would be interested in this? I still have the pole. What about a Hallmark movie?
— Thikasa Postz, translated by Alexander Nimrod.
About the author, Nimrod writes: “A poet-immigrant from Moravia who was born a biological male but is transitioning for better publishing opportunities in the West, Postz divides his time between Outlook, Kasnsas, and Lamncaster, Maine. His former (cis-genered male) name was “Thikasz.” Distantly related, on his mother’s side, to Czeslaw Milosz, and heavily influenced by postwar Polish poetry, Postz’s first book of poems, “A Rozewicz is a Rozewicz is a Rozewicz,” was a runaway best-seller in Moravia, selling more than 50 copies. But he is probably best known for his first book, a critical work titled “A Rozewicz By Any Other Name,” which sought to prove that “Tadeusz Rozewicz” was one of the hundred or so “characters” invented by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa, himself one of Portugal’s greatest poets, was a “heteronym” though many of his inventions were “homonymuals.” Postz’s newest book of poems, “Eastern Europeonies,” will be released sometime this summer by De Flowers Press.”:
Alexander Nimrod regards himself as pre-post-modern in taste and post-op in outlook. He has translated two novels by Bomba Ginn, Fallen Angels and The Parricides. The painting above, “Fallen Angels” by Girodano Luicas, was the source of the cover art for Fallen Angels.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
