Death By Drowning Poem by Sadek Mohammed

So that woman.
That sad woman.
That raunchy sad woman at my friend's funeral
knew that I wanted her more than tea and tobacco,
yet I chose to measure my leave time in bottles of beer.
A bottle for snipers.
A bottle for wet trenches and army samoon.
A bottle for the deep wound in my left side.
A bottle for shrapnel fire at any given moment of the day.
A bottle for the Katyusha salvos
screaming like tempestuous winds in my ears.
A bottle for the bloodstained dust
and the smell of different deaths.
A bottle for my girlfriend who found out
that marrying an officer is a shortcut to El Dorado.
A bottle for Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Bonaparte and Jabar Shanshal.
A bottle for Macbeth, Othello, Richard II and General Qassim.
A bottle for Fortinbras giving orders
to carry Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage.
A bottle for the blue-skinned woman that
tossed the golden apple in the feast of the gods.
A bottle for Plato's academy and Aristotle's ethics.
A bottle for all the bullets shot at me so far.
A bottle for gunners, sappers, signalmen, hedgehogs and mines.
And a bottle for me as I look at my fingers on the grassy knoll
but if I get drunk, …
shoot me!