John Samuel Tieman: For my Nam buddies

this isn’t a poem about manly
battlefields and the many dead
it’s a modern sonnet about traffic
jams and medical exams and my eyes
dilated and my novel a block of blur
how often I’ve sat

alone at say the Subaru shop
waiting on an oil
change and Woodstock comes on
some hidden speaker and the raw old
edges open again and near here a train
blocks a crossing and I think of you and

all these years later
how well we still dig-in