I had the good fortune to come across Matt Borczon’s
poetry in a Facebook writer’s group. If you don’t know that name yet, you
should. He is one of the finest modern poets I have read. After reading just a
few of his poems, I knew that I wanted to read every single line he’d written. Ghost Train happens to be the first that
I got my hands on.
Borczon is a naval veteran who worked as a healthcare provider at Camp Bastion
in Afghanistan, the busiest combat hospital in the war at that time. Unsurprisingly,
he returned to civilian life suffering from PTSD, and his poems are his way of coping
with his condition. To be sure, there have been war poets for as long as there
have been wars, and Borczon’s work has the expected accoutrements: rifles,
wounds, and depthless horror. The weaponry changes, but war itself never really
does. Borczon takes it a step further, exploring the aftermath of nightmares and
the debilitating symptoms of PTSD—the inability to take in stimuli, the
inability to relate to people who have not been through what he’s been through.
I am not a war veteran, but I think this work would speak to any trauma survivor,
to mental health sufferers, to anyone who has ever grappled with their personal
demons, on a profound level.
His work is characterized by no punctuation, just
stream of consciousness. His lines are brutally short, often just a single
word. He told me he does this to capture the feeling of falling down a hole. I
can certainly see that, but I also feel that it conveys a myriad of things:
tunnel vision, narrowness, the pinched sensation that comes with traumatic
stress, and even the lines on a heart monitor.
What I find exceptional about his work is
his gift for weaving seemingly disparate elements into a narrative. It’s what caught
my eye about his work in the first place; that, and his eye for original
imagery. “Survival kit” weaves prayer, therapy, St. John’s wort, scars, jars
and Victory gardens, among other powerful images into a litany of despair. The
short lines make his poems look longer on the page, but it’s barely over 100
words, scarcely a paragraph. He manages to pack so much into such small spaces—but
I suppose that’s a talent soldiers must acquire. “Frozen Charlotte” is another
great example of his ability to make unusual connections, about dolls, an old
folk legend about a girl who froze to death, and the dead children he saw on a
regular basis.
The poems in this collection follow a chronological
order, beginning with “Good bye,” in which the young man embarks on his journey
to Fort Jackson, and, presumably, boot camp. He becomes a medic, and his poems
explore the on-going vigil at the bedsides of the sick and the wounded—not just
his fellow soldiers, but enemy soldiers and civilians, including children. “Repressed
memories” describes the images that haunt his psyche as “coffin/sized memories”;
the children who stepped on IEDs as “dissolved/into a/thin red sigh.”
The poems themselves are straightforward and
accessible, delivered with startling clarity. He speaks of injury and performing
his duties with a frankness that you would expect from a military
report. “Who am I” is stunning in its honesty and bleakness. This matter-of-factness
serves Borczon well—how easily these life-and-death scenarios could become
overwrought. Borczon also makes it a point to illustrate how there are no safe occupations
in war. Even when he transfers briefly to office work in the poem, “Human
Resources,” he discusses filing death certificates.
“A kind person” and “Post deployment” are a one-two
gut punch, exploring the agony of trying to go back to your old life, of
watching movies and walking around your home town. But there is no escaping
what’s in your head. He also perfectly captures the catch-22 of longing for
home, even when you know you can’t ever go there again—there is no returning to
the person that you were.
The collection ends on the poem, “Add it up,” an
attempt to quantify his experiences, an exhausted accounting of what lays behind
him (patients, rounds of ammunition, detainees, severed limbs) and what lays
before him (prayers, missed birthdays, therapy sessions, medication). These are
poems about coping, but sometimes, that means finding the beginning of the
beginning of something that could eventually lead to healing. Coping is endless
work ahead, like that scene in Poltergeist, when the hallway seems to extend on
forever. There is no resolution. You get out of the traumatic event, but you
never really get out of it. There is only the tunnel vision, the day-by-day. I
appreciate so much that Borczon does not sugarcoat that reality.
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