Men Without

Remembering Hemingway’s story collection, Men Without Women,

how his father killed himself, how his mother dressed him as a girl 

until he was four. How he volunteered, left the country, drove 

an ambulance for the Italian army in 1917, before the US 

entered the First World War. How he was severely injured, 

hospitalized, came back, then left again, expatriate, to write

in Paris, to live without. How he asked, And what is there that 

you can say about him now that he is dead? about Conrad 

when he died in 1924. How he never fully returned 

from the first war, nor the next, how he thought 

the FBI was following him (they were), and then, 

bereft, put a shotgun in his mouth, the blood 

that stirred within, without.

For twenty years we’ve known no year without 

a war, and in that time another generation lost, gone 

wandering the rotunda taking pictures of themselves, 

having broken in, trampling their own underfoot, 

shitting, pissing in the halls of Congress, legislators 

hiding under desks, two Capitol police officers without 

a place to go anymore putting pistols to their heads. 

What are we to say about them now that they are dead? 

What to say about each of us, what story left to tell, 

what way to find the words to speak to the blood 

that runs, that always stirs within, without?