Remembering

All that I remember from Apocalypse Now

Is the fire over the gum trees

And the doors singing about the end. 

The Lieutenant screaming

Over the camouflage helicopter’s roar

As Marlon Brando looks at shards of a reflection

In brown ripples, napalm and steel bullets

Taking over a country.

Francis Coppola was narrating the terror

Because my parents couldn’t turn it off

And Coppola told us he was in Manila

Listening to the World Series

On a wind up radio and Michael sheen

Was outside with fake blood

Caked over his body. 

The narration ends in my father’s voice who’s

Singing over Jim Morrison

In a bellowing tenor, because he wants to forget

That he was there too in Cambodia,

Washing the bloody mud off his calves in the sick river.