By: Royal

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,

I wish that I could just go unconscious. Have the world pass me by as I lay around in my head thinking about the same things I would have thought about if I were actually contributing to this fucked up world and this fucking hilarious war we've started. Being in a coma would make everything just so much easier. It would give me an infinite amount of time to think. Just think about life and how it should be. Know one would interrupt me because I would, well I would be unreachable. That's how the guy next to me described it in the infirmary. I had to spend a night their cause my bad eye was starting to act up, you know with all the smoke out there. He said he was in a coma for about a month, a shell exploded near his camp and a brick hit him in the head. He described the whole ordeal as being more of a curious experience.

Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,

A coma would get rid of these awful dreams that keep me up during the nights and haunt me during the day. Last night I dreamt my pop was commander of the Vietnam army. I dreamt he walked up to me, cool as a rock and stuck a gun straight into my bad eye. I watched the eye pop out of my skull and role helplessly around on the floor, looking for the socket it had come from. I watched my father laugh, dosing out flem and spit with every hark of amusement. Then he just keeled over and died and I just stared at him in a disturbed awe.

And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains,
Within the sound of silence.

I remember his face, a very distinct expression planted upon it. It was like he was saying I told you so or don't say I didn't warn you, a real smug expression. In the dream I had kicked his head with its snobbish face and spat upon the dirt he had died on. After that everything kinda faded out and I woke up at the rising bell all hot and sweaty and out of breath like I had just been doing drills for hours. The rest of the day I just couldn't get his face out of my head. I thought of the dream while I was eating the daily grub, while I was doing drills, during rec time at the end of the day, I just couldn't get it out of my head. It was like, like a song that kept playing though I only knew part of the verse so I just kept singing those lyrics over and over and over again. Seeing my dads face over and over and over.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.

I'm not the only one who has dreams like that, that you just can't put away. This one dude, Privet Judd maybe, I don't know, but he had this dream about his radical brother, yelling at him for joining the war. For the rest of the day the dude went around screaming in all the sergeant's and general's faces about how he couldn't control the drafting's and how it wasn't his fault that he got shipped away to some fucking island that hated his guts... of course I heard this second hand but the guy telling it to me said Judd got hole duty for a week, don't know if he came back, might have gotten shot down half way through.

People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,

They do have shrinks in Vietnam. Not many but a few. I doubt they give a fuck about what we say though. They come to the hospitals after air raids and such, talk to the patients who are conscious. I bet they just, just scribble and doodle away while people missing limbs talk their fucking hearts out about their feelings. I bet they could give a fuck about a paralyzed dude who wants to talk to them about how he's coping. I've been to one before, about my eye, but it wasn't in Vietnam. Back in Virginia my mom sent me to one after the incident with my dad. All the shrink had to say was "how does your father act when he sees you cleaning your eye or when you ask him to buy more medicine?" "Do you feel self conscious about missing an eye?" "Do people sympathize for you, openly?" "How does that make you feel?", "How does that make you feel?", "How does that make you feel?" I told the woman to go fuck her self.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.

There are some people of course who don't mind being in Vietnam. I mean someone has to like being here or else the radicals would have given it a rest already. Most of the people who like it here have been here the longest, though I guess when you think about it, you can't really tell. Most of the oldies weren't drafted and that's why they have been on the front for so long. And even the oldies who were drafted, first on the list or whatever, well now they are either conformed to the ways of the war and forgot about their defiant days as a hippy, or they are still fully against the war but are trying to live with the hand they were dealt, trying to just, ignore the mass protests they read about in the paper, ignore the fact that their friends were probably some where in that crowd, shouting and marching right along with the rest of the youth of America.

And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.

God, I have met so many, interesting, people on my nightly visits to the infirmary. Every one there always seems to have some sort of gossip. But their gossip isn't the same kind of gossip as the gossip in high school, this gossip is like, artificial. Its like, we're stuck here with the same people everyday, so lets make it interesting. It's all war gossip. "Are we moving here at such and such time," "did we bombed so and so place yesterday." Its all shit, they only tell it in an attempt to create this synthetic community, gives them something to belong to I guess, something besides numbers and ranks.

And the signs said, The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.

I salute those bastards though. They try to make do with what they have got even if what they have got is pathetic. They are pathetic. They know they are pathetic and yet they choose to live with it everyday. There are so many ways to commit suicide here; it would just be a matter of choosing. Every soldier has his preference, kinda like a back up plan I guess. Like if they are scheduled for hole duty or something like that, and they just don't want to go through with it. Personally I would go with carbon monoxide. I mean you can't walk a mile with out seeing a great tank of the stuff. I would just lie down next to one, doze off for a couple of hours and, when I woke up, well, I wouldn't wake up.

And whisper'd in the sounds of silence.