My brother and I agree
our father returned from
that frozen reservoir in Korea
with deities attached to him,
but not just any kind of deity.
What followed the lieutenant home
was the kind of deity that thrives on chaos,
on division and terror and bloodshed.
For lack of a better term for it, we agreed to call it
chaos demon, the demon of war.
Although in retrospect it seems
overkill that we would find ourselves
battling Korean war demons in childhood,
since similar demons had already
saturated the Pacific Northwest soil
with the spoils of the Puget Sound Wars
a century before either of us was born.
Chaos demons thrived where countless thousands
whose tribe had no word for war died at the hands of tools
programmed to serve the greedy colonists taking everything,
from the fertile land to the name of the mountain once called Tahoma,
renamed Rainier after the admiral and his chaos demons.
Which makes it hard to say whether
the demon in the wall who tried to
take my brother to that place of no return
was Korean, or native to the Enumclaw Plateau.
It would only matter if there’s a distinction between them
other than the obvious, which was that it thrived on chaos
and devouring the innocence of children.
It thrived on families torn apart,
on the perversions of faith that lead to
sexual abuse, indoctrination into
false narratives, and all things
that go unspoken but need
to be held up to the light and studied
for the kernel of truth they contain.
It is those truths the chaos demons
do not want us to discover, their
greatest fear being the formation
of a cohesive picture of the chaos
in which they thrive.
Cohesion is kryptonite to chaos.
Which is why there has never been
an explanation for why I never heard
the innocent laughter of my little brother
after the chaos demon of war promised
I would never hear it again.
Nor does it explain the manufacturing of demons
those resource capitalists are so fond of.
Manufacturing chaos demons in the Halls of Congress,
with the help of chaos demons in the Senate prayer breakfasts
with their chaos demons promoting war in the
badly translated new international versions of badly translated missives
from entities promoting the chaos of war in their name.
Crusades and Inquisitions One and Two Point Oh
Wars of Roses and wars of bread and circuses,
ratings wars, drug wars and culture wars
are all how we feed them
and yet knowing this has never helped me
bring my brother back from that place
the chaos demon took him
when we were too young
to know how to manage an evil
none of us have ever been taught
how to manage,
since the chaos demons
have made sure we never learn.
Because knowledge is power
and the chaos demons of war
don’t want us to have the power it takes
to use the kryptonite we are all born with
to smother them with cohesion.
For Gregor
© Adrienne Veronese
