Like Tom Lehrer said "if you want any songs about WWIII, you better start now"


Wearing bloody shoes he sat quietly
with dead pidgeons by his side.
No one and everyone noticed this nobody.
This veteran could be a muse for a poem,
an epic movie, or the great American novel
but there by the grace of God everyone was late.
There were people to see and profits to take.
His story like so much dried spit on the sidewalk
will just evaporate and never turn a buck.

Then his bloodshot eyes
suddenly looked inside me.
I heard myself say,
Hey mister? Are you OK?

He said

"I cried, I tried and I died"

and then he did.

Perhaps he'll be missed
by bartenders and cheap whores.
I will never know
that he was a veteran physician
who fought the bird flu of 2007.
I was never told because the poet,
producer and novelist
are also on their way to heaven
telling their stories of nobody
to the nobody.
who cried
tried
and died.