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i.
He wore the chain he forged in life;
he made it link by link, and yard by yard.
Back when times was hard
young Bosco shook punk fools
like loose maracas. He took their chunky gold and jewels
and wove himself that gilded noose.

Grandma Baracus would wake
gone midnight, shrieking some stranger's name.
It was the family curse, she said,
passing your whole wretched stretch on this earth,
shackled to the knowing of when and how
you'd end up dead.

Chains was in the blood. Chains ran
through generations put
to picking that soft, white bud,
yoked in gangs and forever singing.
Chains ran back to ships and men
stacked together like sacks of black leather.

Link by link, chains ran back to roots.
Long before the white man came,
on hot soil tilled by the Mandinkas,
some Baracus forefather spilled blood by moonlight.
Crazed with hate, he killed a whole village that night;
slit their throats then razed their huts to motes.

And there's no shrugging free
Grandma sighed, that's the rub.
Since so many died shut-eyed,
we, his descendents, been cursed
to trudge this earth with the curtain
drawn back on our certain demise.

Like somebody been hypnotised, pined Grandma,
we stalk the long, cold walk of our lives.
We're like moths, Bosco '
no matter how we flap
somehow we wind up trapped and blind
on that final flight into hot, white candlelight.

ii.
BA dreamt of planes.
He broke sleep screaming like a bank
of jet engines with the throttle
opened up to full. He saw fuel burning,
watched black smoke surge like squid ink
through a sky of liquid blue.

Nam, '66, Sergeant Baracus
gunned down gook attackers,
running over open ground
to save spooked privates
and bitch-slap battle-weary crackers
in a sleet of flak and ashes.

Shunning choppers and airstrikes,
BA seemed bullet-proof.
While squads crept slow as molasses
Bosco beat trails and popped caps in VC asses
without blinking an eye,
like death was for some other fool.

Those jungle summers,
you could hear the clang of jewellery
from Da Nang to the Ia Dang Valley '
it rang louder than booms
round doomed platoons at Dak To and Loc Ninh,
louder than the din of a dozen fat-wombed bombers

and howls round the tomb of Ho Chi Minh
and a hand grenade sans the pin
and Hendrix's axe and Tet mortar attacks
and the screams of thin daughters divested of skin.
Night time tested him.
Dark dreams infested him.

The Team swam like commando sharks
through a sea of perfect Mekon Delta green,
wading through shaded mangrove swamps
to blow ammo dumps. They built
shelters out of wilted palm fronds
and made land crawlers from bamboo.

Cos out in the shit
it's enough to drive a sucka howlin mad
with pity
for fools.
Four soldiers of fortune, one phenomenal future '
those guys were tight as an abdominal suture

but it went down quicker than a napalm sunset '
he'd never forget how his quartet got framed,
blamed for a raid on a Hanoi bank
banged up in a max security stockade.
Yet to a Baracus it all seemed fitting '
doing time for a crime you ain't guilty of committing.

iii.
Bosco lay slack in a cola-black funk,
deeper somehow than those pre-flight comas
that used to come each time
he drank the milk in his pack lunch
and fell foul
of a tranq-fuelled sucka punch.

No more running from the law;
the Team pardoned
like a fart in an elevator.
BA was no hardened cogitator
but he'd got to thinking
'bout how life just wasn't fun no more.

There's tougher things
than bringing in ganglords
with a reconditioned forklift '
like the empty drift of getting older
like letting go
like the load on your shoulders

that never did get lighter.
The world's a dark and weary place
sans Murdock, Hannibal and Face;
each lost to ugly, mundane,
plotless things ' a tumour, Alzheimer's,
a fall from a balcony.

By what strange alchemy
did those chains change
from gold to lead?
BA yearned to be dead
but though he saved through winters
to fly south

the curse, it seemed, had fled.
No airborne doom rose to meet him
just red-eye on the long haul
and hours of dry air;
no lofty heaven, just miles of cloud
and nothing, nothing, everywhere.