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Tunnels Crawling down headfirst into the hole, he kicks the air & disappears. I feel like I'm down there with him, moving ahead, pushed by a river of darkness, feeling blessed for each inch of the unknown. Our tunnel rat is the smallest man in the platoon, in an echo chamber that makes his ears bleed when he pulls the trigger. He moves as if trying to outdo blind fish easing toward imagined blue, pulled by something greater than life's ambitions. He can't think about spiders & scorpions mending the air, or care about bats upside down like gods in the mole's blackness. The damp smell goes deeper than the stench of honey buckets. A web of booby traps waits, ready to spring into broken stars. Forced onward by some need, some urge, he knows the pulse of mysteries & diversions like thoughts trapped in the ground. He questions each root. Every cornered shadow has a life to bargain with. Like an angel pushed up against what hurts, his globe-shaped helmet follows the gold ring his flashlight casts into the void. Through silver lice, shit, maggots, & vapor of pestilence, 5 he goes, the good soldier, on hands & knees, tunneling past death sacked into a blind corner, loving the weight of the shotgun that will someday dig his grave. 6 ...

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