PJ Heneghan poetry

 1981 No one will touch you, it’s in your blood like love. A body the weight of a broomstick leaning against a wall; a gust of wind would send you falling to the ground and you would lie there, just lie there, with aching bones in full view through paper skin; crossing over one another like a GRID. Human Immunodeficiency Virus- coughing up daydreams, sweating up hope.   Your lover lays beside you, your name in his mouth and the medical forms. A death sentence bubbling in your stomach. Ripples in the bedsheets are like waves to float on and away, from this dark bedroom Into a place where touch can’t kill you. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome- crying at the clinic, you will never get married.   Mom and Dad won’t look you in the eyes, this might be the last chance they get to see you, but you are alone in the too-clean hospital, zidovudine for breakfast. The curtain is drawn, and you see the row of beds next to you, ...

  The kill team- members of the 5 th Stryker Brigade   You are barely fifteen when your home becomes a hunting ground,   For the creatures inside the Kevlar   coffin. Staring out of an armoured machine, bodies half-hidden like a mongoose, coloured only by their Hazel uniform and jet-black riffles.   Several handfuls of candy are thrown from  the vehicle: Airheads, Hershey’s, M&M’s.  Like confetti or locusts cutting through the  Afghanistan sky, sending clouds of dust to  rise from the ground. Warm, sticky breath  fills the air as they take aim. And children  come running, as children do, with arms  outstretched and smiles as deep, wide and  colossal as the valleys of Grand Canyon or the Band-e Amir. Yet, whenever their small hands  grab at the treats resting in the sand, as children do, small bodies drop and their mothers can only watch.  You do not know of this, of course, you are work...