Johnny Got His Gun

“I know. I know girl. Get into the bedroom. Both of you. Maybe you never get another chance. Go on K’reen.”

This is a war and war is hell and what the hell and so to hell with it.

So they cut my arm off. How am I going to work now? They don’t think of that. They don’t think of anything but doing it their own way.

Because it wasn’t your fight Joe. You never really knew what the fight was all about.

There was a smell about the fair grounds you never forgot. A smell you never ceased dreaming of. He would always smell it somewhere back in his mind as long as he lived.

The piano kept time with the bell and the bell with the piano and in back of it there was thick silence and a yearning to listen and lonesomeness.

Only when you’re deaf you’re lonesome. You’re godforsaken.

The telephone bell was just part of a dream. It had sounded different from any other telephone bell or any other sound because it had meant death.

But exactly how many hundred or thousands of the dead-while-living does that give us? We don’t know. We don’t ask. We turn away from them; we avert the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, face.

“Why should I look, it wasn’t my fault, was it?”