Tag: war

Godspeed

On By Donny Lee DukeIn army life, PoetryLeave a comment
the new recruit, the author (18), basic training photo

As a member of Together We Served, the largest U.S. Military veteran’s site, I recently participated in a monthly writing competition, my entry below. Each month they ask a different question, and there is one winner and five runner ups, and they give prize money to all. I did not even get runner up. Click here to see the winners of June 2025. (If it’s been awhile, you’ll have to click on the back pages at the bottom of the page to see the winners)

The question for June 2025: “Lessons Learned Advice: What advice would you give a new recruit just starting out their military career? Please describe any specific lessons you learned the hard way from your own service!“

Godspeed
Wow, the question:
what would you say to a new recruit?
I'd light 'em on fire
with the spirit of the ages
guardin' humanity wore,
put them in a soldier’s uniform
to bring them round to themselves
the substance of that uniform,
the evidence they need to survive.

The secrets of the army:
let's go up the ladder;
Abraham Lincoln,
look it square on.
He was the underdog.
Even his boots laughed at him.
He needs to get its specification places.
How tall is that lamp
if it’s minus airborne freeze?

Get into the business of the army.
You’re not there pullin' teeth.
No matter how wide you have come,
how much this will do you in civilian life,
be unto the army the soldier it needs.
Any specialty can wear Airborne.
Educational benefits aside,
that Airborne's a gig.
You have an opportunity to face yourself,
learn how you grow.

Test yourself,
be that Ranger,
that Green Beret,
if you re done with paddy cake,
if you want to climb the world,
go the distance.
I can t hold you close.
Everybody's their own mood.

Alright you're an orderly,
or a vehicle repair specialist,
or get into computers.
We need those too.
See how you tick.
Be an army specialist.
Let that uniform wear you.
Volunteer for field duty,
sleep out in the cold.

Your entire life will talk about this moment,
and you're setting its patterns now.
Your time in service
is an aquifer
you'll draw from all your life.
Test yourself.
Know your limits.
Repeating that's good practice,
the best boat you could drive
over your troubled waters.
It s what you're here for,
the army your qualifier.

If you haven't done it before,
challenge that square one of yourself.
What does it mean out of the hand,
this frozen,
your stamina?
Can you get past that point?
Can you teach people to do that too
when all hell breaks loose,
when you engineer combat?
I'm a survival parade.

This is soft stuff.
Alright commando,
what has she seen with you,
the modern warfare?
You can sure run amok.
You’ve done it,
you’ve bloodied corpse,
pinched some ears off
tearin' apart civilian lives.
You would not want to kill civilians
or cause mayhem.

Would you ever,
would you ever brush your teeth in it?
Human rights law,
and let that be your guide.
I found someone needed to be intensity through now,
the cutting edge of that battlefield,
goin' on main street
doin' the duty
that lifts apart your life.

Habit something else.
About time is it.
Bring the money,
payin' for the part.
Can you advance as a human being?
I don't think this is rank put on,
but certainly a sergeant
has peaked encountered himself
at the role of that rank,
and a captain has gone beyond
the pettiness of himself,
and yes ma'am you wear rank too.
You certainly do.

Yes sir you certainly have,
gut in the garden,
you pull out pearls.
Mirroring enough NCOs,
we knows we have to count Brunos,
a dog that rides shoulders with the army.
This will happen
while we attack
we give everybody a hard time
as if it shouldn't be
some stupid protocol.

Well you've got it.
Learn how to be
I'm glad to be here,
and I'm getting good food anyway.
Perfect,
you're in the army now.
It’s costly.
Wide the terrain.
It will shape you for the rest of your life.

Write All the Paper

Full of self-importance, and there being no doubt in my mind that I should be chosen as a squad leader, I went to the platoon leader’s room at the back of the barracks to tell him, not worrying about anyone hearing, that a ruckus was happening he should attend to. I actually said it outside his door loud enough so that people could hear it. I thought I was showing my leadership skills by taking responsibility here.

It was a one-station-unit-training, basic and infantry school combined, at Harmony Church, Fort Benning, 1979, and it had just started. It was after lights out, and almost the whole platoon had gathered to watch a fight in our barracks. After I told the platoon leader what was happening, a new recruit also but one near 30-years-old, he put an end to it, and we all went back to bed, and nobody suffered any consequences, and I knew they wouldn’t, he being one of us. All stupidity aside, my action really did have a lot to do with not wanting us all to be outside in the push-up position for however long the infraction called for.

The next morning my whole world changed. The entire platoon was seething at me with one word, rat, and it took days to even get my best buddy back at my side, although some weren’t involved in this, but I couldn’t see those people for trees. The fight hadn’t been a fight but a mock fight involving the new recruit at the top of the pecking order, not in anything to do with the army but was some carry over from the popularity status of high school, the most of us being just fresh from that. He was play fighting with his best buddy, and the whole platoon wanted to watch, minus recruits I hadn’t noticed they were so, how can I say, mature for their age?

There then ensued two months of day and night harassment and bullying that took on TV proportions. Begs, the popular kid, made up this ongoing role play. I was Frank Burns of M.A.S.H., and Begs was Hawkeye, of course, and his best buddy was Trapper, and others had other roles. I can’t give you the awful enormity of this. It was played out to the tune of me just wanting to kill myself. My pride in myself, and my self-respect, I lost one day when I just broke down and cried in front of everybody, like an eight-year-old, after being lured away from my unlocked wall locker so that I’d get in trouble when they told the drill sergeant I’d left it unlocked. But my crying only made it worse. Soon after, one night while sleeping, I got my hair filled with shaving cream, and it was so strange to me how that made its way into my dream and became a part of it before I woke up, seeing that culprit shrinking off, and I can go on and on, but the worst would happen in the cattle car going back to the barracks at night after a long day of training.

One night, Begs had made up a song aimed at me, and the platoon was singing it, and with so much glee, some popular tune I don’t remember that he’d ill-adapted to fit his nefarious needs, but you had to hand it to the guy; he was creative. I looked on in disbelief, just silent now with all the abuse. Then out of the woodwork and out of nowhere two normally quiet recruits stood up and put a stop to it, one engaging the mob and the other bending down and making me feel better, they both befriending me and remaining near me watching my back until the end of the course. Heroes there were to me then and still are, gentle souls but with sharp teeth. They went to the drill sergeant when we got back that night and told him what had been happening, and he locked the platoon’s heels and made sure I wouldn’t be harassed anymore, and I wasn’t.

I might add that I graduated ranked third in the platoon, won an off-base pass, but no one said a word, and in subsequent Jump School, I didn’t get a gig the whole time but had somehow been overlooked and didn’t get a white helmet, and because I saw how harassed the white helmets where, I didn’t say a word. I was soldier of the year of lll Corps and Ft. Cavasos, 1981, had dinner with that general more than once, and I graduated on the Commandant’s List of the Special Forces Qualification Course, 1982. Hawkeye got an inability to adapt discharge while we were in Jump School.

The moral of the story is be very careful in telling on anyone, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do, and I’m talking about those two heroes in that cattle car, not what I did, which could remind you of Major Burns.

The Rose of Society

On By Donny Lee DukeIn Poetry1 Comment
photo by the author
How do you find machine?
Oh goodness,
far back.
It’s got trailers on it.
A beast slowly rise out of man,
and he gets his fire goin’.
He starts to tremble
with the layout of things.
She puts that in her pocket.
All around there’s roar.
It squeezes yah tightly.
You just die all the time—
someone taken from you again.

This is evil,
however it happens.
You can’t do away with it.
It hurts you so.
You just sit there and bleed
and trust yourself.
Industry is everywhere
in small measure.
You wrap it up,
you’re little vision of yourself

that gets you to protect yourself.

Do you see society bein’ formed?
It lasted a whole lifetime,
your rock the machine.
It was about safety
and hard work
and gettin’ your stupid rituals down to practice.
The group took over.
You couldn’t bake bread.
The individual hadn’t come so far.
You had to make society’s bed.
It didn’t let you sleep.

Where’s drums and spirituality?
In the daily life of man.
The Gods were a strange brood.
You were not real to Them.
You lifted up your voice,
and they put you in the skins of man.
You had too much animal on yah
before that.

Can we dream of spiritual states?
It happened upon a beanpole.
This was not our outward yet.
Society trudged along
a warrior’s path.
Let’s translate instinct into man.
Survival
became the main issue here.
Let’s translate little groups into men.
It was all fought out,
this land is your land this land is mine.
This occupied so much time.
We were murderous,
burying one another
in our stone houses cold.

Women lit the fire.
They got down with the children
on their hands and knees
and looked for grub.
They escaped the network
fight for the land.
They wore clothes
and urged men to pray.
They did not have society’s lair.
They did not rule the show.
They were the influence of the feminine on man.
It really shaped society.
They gave it their all
for a warm place for their children.
We have stable homes because of it.
We need society because of it.

When did marriage come down,
as in you leave my wife alone?
When did we give permission to rape?
Did we organize government stopping murder?
We haven’t even planted food yet
in these early days.
Writing is a thing of the Gods.
We see it in sleep,
and it takes so long
to come down to our hand.
My poem is long before that.

How do we rob each other?
We just let each other be,
and we kick the shit out of each other
when the werewolf hits us.
We grow up with ruckus
all around us.
The quality of life sucks.
We don’t have vision yet.
No one hasn’t seen that far.
We don’t know our dreams are telling us things,
and then we take them by the hand—
a seer is born,
and he’s there to break the rules.

He gets visions of good things
that get spat on.
He hasn’t woven status into the band yet.
It comes and goes.
He’s able to prevent a war
with his vision.
He can show them the way ahead.
He practices art.
These are things he sees.
They are bright and shiny
to his people.
He gets wonder over them.
He lifts his head up and sees God.

He wore a mask.
He played with the boy some.
He didn’t just sit there and explain the sky.
He revealed Himself as God
and that was it.
It was not love divine love who prefigured there.
Primitive man was bound and the stakes were high.
They had to find out
primitive man.

The epiphany of art
gave us broad in our lives.
It opened meditation’s room
and stairwell’s stare.
It gave us delight in ourselves,
and it brought in the world
for our favorite viewing.
It structured society?
No it did not.
It rounded us some.
It gave us eavesdropping eves
on the lowdown.
It sang in the firelight
to a butler’s call.
It ever brightened our room.

Can we see it today?
Time has erased this memory,
but where you find it,
it reveals ourselves.
Do you see it?
It’s got more on it than paint.
It’s got our lives on it
in this very poem.

Society’s carve out
isn’t finished yet.
We have a long way to go.
We have a thunder-swept road directly in front of us.
This is society’s mandate to change.
We’ve got to really change.
It’s not gonna come easy.
Everybody will resist it.
It means changing your way of life.
There’s no other way.
We will die if we don’t.

Respect my poem.
You don’t know it’s bringin’ you
all the way to change.
I’ve got the future in a handbag
I write poems from,
some aspects of it.
It’s a piece of cake
in no way, shape, or form.
We have a blight of change.
Everything about us will have to change
except the basic modes of life.

We will structure society differently.
We will not lie to ourselves anymore.
We will do away with crime and punishment
and love the prisoner as much as ourselves,
but we will still rope him along.
Society will be organized in little groups
of sadhana relays,
where dream has put us together.
We will return to the inner life
wholeheartedly,
and we will share this with each other.
We will stay with each other not as families,
though we will love and respect our family kin.
Our parents will be too young to raise us,
most of the time.
Society’s job will be raising kids,
the spiritual order of the day.
We will get down and dirty with spirituality.
Children will be allowed to school
their talent and scribe.
They will not spend all day there,
and they will like it there.

I think you can count us upon the roads now.
We are not an overpopulated city.
No one makes money anymore.
We work for each other,
and we work and we play
to get this life down,
to do it right—
each one of us involved in that.
We have sex with each other
when we are young.
Sex is a child’s play,
a teenage growing into,
a young adult getting out of.
The mature adult,
the one past thirty,
will leave sex.

We don’t put each other in cars.
Transportation is all arranged,
and we are welcomed to go anywhere
on the planet.
A brighter world
will see a smaller us.
We got our numbers down.
We are an epiphany of the stars,
and we will all translate this in our rooms,
going to Supermind,
going to Earth’s destiny,
the monumental change
that will change us all
from divine living on this Earth
to living on a divine Earth.
That’s the rank and file.

Can’t you see it?
It’s there just look at it.
It’s all around us now,
the hope we survive,
the longing that has made Earth,
the beauty we’re going to be.
Now get ready.
The fire of change will be upon us soon.

To a notebook
I will question this universe.
I will go to my notebook.
That’s for the prosperity of mankind.
You don’t see it.
You can’t.
You can’t read long poems
by the wrong sort of person
your handicapped say.

Now is this an idle mirage?
Freedom for the individual
in the very arms of society,
that’s what I’m writing today;
that’s where I’m at today.
It will come to pass.
It’s already here,
where God meets man.
The price of sacrifice,
I lay it on you.

Now let’s see this vision
in its native room,
where we belong today,
givin’ it to town.
I put everything in here,
give it.
It’s all the whole wide world
in vision.
Of these questions,
I pulled mine out overhead.
I’m not a problem.
I speak your menu.
I’m right on top of it
at my house.
I’m just here with my child,
parenting.
Give this vision time to heal.
Let it do what it’s supposed to do,
show you you.

Look at the Outcast

On By Donny Lee DukeIn ego activism, Inner Voice and Vision, overhead poetry, seer poetry2 Comments

Adolf Hitler 1933

Infant Orgasm,
Infant Orgasm You See

(Note: from July 2016 to December 2016, I posted seer poems on Facebook written specifically for our educational page Harm’s End. I know FB was aware of the posting at the time, because some poems were boosted and had to go through Facebook’s review process, with one being rejected, one about the prophet Mohammad, although FB did not take it down or flag it in any way. On August 4, 2020, I copied all the poems, along with their images, to my computer, and a day later a poem from 2016 was taken down for violating their community standards, showing me my activity was being closely monitored by FB. I then deleted any image I thought FB might object to, unaware that an image of Hitler is now flagged by FB as a matter of course. That it is now but wasn’t in 2016 reflects a growing trend of censorship on the net. It won’t be long before anything that seriously questions the generally accepted reality construct or tires to introduce things that construct isn’t seeing and doesn’t want to will be banned from the major social media platforms and taken as far as possible out of the public eye. In other words, the net will become like TV.

This poem along with this image was posted on FB September 10, 2016. It was flagged August 15, 2020, but not taken down, citing it violated their community standards, and I edited it the following day, adding material in brackets within the poem that explain the poetry, to make it clear I wasn’t violating their community standards. Within 10 minutes after editing it, our page Harm’s End was unpublished. Although this poem fits into a poetic conversation on my FB feed and is out of context to post here by itself, I’m posting it here to protest the censorship of art and poetry on Facebook and on the net in general, in this case, poetry whose purpose it is to heal, not harm, however controversial it may be.)

Executive order.
Anyway she just surprised me.
Hitler, the 1st letters of incest,
rape.
It started World War II.
Half the money
the gate come open.
What come out?
I know it,
the material,
the material of war,
the material of concrete war.

Incest gun,
check it out.
That’s not a gift.
It’s an orgasm
your mom gives ya,
or your dad,
an adult in the family.
The house owner
outside of somethin’.
It’s American.
We know it’s German.
It’s also England,
all countries,
just a story on it
broken.
You wouldn’t hit everybaby,
enough to organize
the required material.
Is that war?
You said it baby.

It’s German
under the feet.
That means it’s right there:
kill ‘em,
thousands gas.
Bring them on the table
but be careful.
Daddy was good wasn’t he
or mommy special?
We do this in an orderly fashion.
Got that right.
Just line ‘em up
and shoot ‘em,
terrible.
I’m gonna
keep comin’.
What’s this?
An orderly compound,
an orderly room.
Procedure, procedure?
And we built the gas chambers,
and we built
orgasm.

Give that kid
trouble,
not between his legs,
not
now,
not now.
Look out the window.
Go to the door.
It needs an umbrella:
the night of the generals.
They have a very detailed IQ.

THEY.
People are bad.
Not everybody.
He doesn’t like,
he has a very knowledgeable
presence with Jews.
Art school,
they wouldn’t let ‘im in.
Art college,
they wouldn’t let him in now.
Okay make them unworthy,
lump them with all the undesirables,
society’s degenerates,
but blame them for everything.
They are the masterminds
of all that’s wrong with the world,
of all that’s wrong with our country.

[understand the poetry: those are Hitler’s views, not the poet’s.]

Fell down –
see a war,
a war,
a world war:
give to me
my mountain.

You have to understand
orgasm.
It changes war.
It’s a blitzkrieg
of physical pleasure
on an I unformed.
One second.
There’s an I.
Is there
more like the animal I.
Is that me?
That building centerfold
the earth
is removed from the scene.
I’m a baked chump,
burn in a holocaust of pleasure.

Understand
repeated action,
all this mess over time.
It has a tendency
to rob you of pleasure,
organize your role
an antenna
to try and get things in order,
down
if you know what I mean,
not up in the sky.
Look at
the nice uniforms,
the insignia,
the roll of tanks.

You’ve been robbed you see,
and that damage,
and you in ego formation,
and God did it,
your parent.
Any questions Paramount?
That’s it.

(There is, it should be understood, a personal interpretation to this poem throughout, since, in truly inspired art, in seer poetry especially, it’s at bottom, however remotely, also about the artist. In this light, the verse about Hitler being rejected from art college and subsequently scapegoating all Jews because of that can also be interpreted to be about the refusal of my entire society, Jews, non-Jews, everybody, to let me into the art of the day, but the personal interpretation isn’t tit for tat with the poem, as it just lights upon it here and there. If you want to know how the personal interpretation applies to the main subject of the poem, infant orgasm, read this comment I posted on Medium before my Medium account is also suspended, because I color outside the lines.

If you want to know the occult truth behind Hitler, read the book The Light That Shone Into the Dark Abyss by Maggi Lidchi-Grassi, 1994, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press (not available to read online). Facebook, which almost a third of the world’s population uses, has such an unwarranted and inequitable influence over the knowledge that we pass around, and it (like not only the other online mega-businesses, but also the major news outlets and the great majority of the entertainment industry I might add) is in its core beliefs reductionist materialist, however many employees it has that doesn’t hold those beliefs. If that’s not enough, it’s in it for profit, and if Facebook encounters material that makes people feel uncomfortable, a loss of profit steps in and makes the decision, and even if it doesn’t violate its policies, FB will simply ban it. Now, the truth of us, the good, the bad, and the ugly, it might hurt to hear it, you know?

Is the human matter finished? I mean, is there anything more to discover about us other than the fundamental beliefs that we’ve built human society upon, and those are that we are individual human islands expendable to the sea of humanity and inconsequential compared to it, islands possessing an absolute freewill and a consciousness that doesn’t extend beyond the island that we each are, and, in the intrinsic ground of who we are, we are nothing more than that island? Here we are at the cutting edge of humanity. This is the denied knowledge trying to gain entry: there is more to discover about us, and we are more than that.

I’ll end with an analogy to put the subject matter of this poem into a context that will make what I’m attempting here more apparent:

“This thing no one ever talks about before, and when we are the first ones to talk about it, there are a lot of people that think this thing shouldn’t be touched, this thing is you know, sacred, and the people that think you are going too far, and all of these people are going to undermine our movement, for sure.” Quote from a Thai protester in Bangkok speaking to a BBC reporting about protesters questioning the power of the Thai monarchy. Source: BBC video “Thai protests: Thousands join rally in Bangkok”, 17 Aug 2020.)