Baxter Had No Idea: A spoken-word poem by James Navé

Baxter had no idea why flowers thrilled him or why the full moon tugged his spirit—pulled it up out of his body into the sky, reaching, reaching for a dream full of desire to carve a parting yellow sea out of the long, black, dangling night under which he walked and walked across mud and old fallen trees and comrades spread as far as his eyes could see across the land. All music gone—nobody left to nod in the mud, or lean into prayers or worship the illusions of reflections cut out of the nine lives that nobody remembered—that once the cats owned. “And neither do I,” Baxter thought, as the army from the east roared over, so close, so close, so close to the thirsty land. Sacred land where kind eyes never belong anymore—and the monks and the gods and the children don't dance, nor do they follow the shadows up past the owls and the spiders. Baxter gave commands. Baxter had been in this business for a long time. He loved once before he fell in love with the trenches and the bullets and the old flowers that always returned after the long dead eyed winter was over. Baxter understood war belongs to the old, the ones that live elsewhere in the wealth and the lands beyond where he stood, like the chill of some soul that belongs nowhere. And yet he knew they were there somewhere like spirits way out beyond where he stood. Baxter turned to his friend, there in the hollow crossing—they leaned together; they kissed each other, loaded their rifles, fired at the men from the east. “Evil belongs to the other planets and the dead and me and the ones I once loved,” Baxter thought as he marched on into the day.