Boy Soldier

What a smile! One large lamp for a face,
smaller lanterns where skin stretches over
bones waiting for muscle to fill their bread
basket, body all angles and joints.

His Kalashnikov fires at each moving
thing before he knows what he drags
down. He halts movement of every
kind and fails to weigh who he stops

dead or maims as a result of his bullets
like jabs thrown before the thought
to throw them, or involuntary shudders
when someone, somewhere, steps

over his grave, in his case pint-sized,
narrow, shallow, unmarked, mass.
But his smile remains undimmed,
inviting, not knowing what hit him,

what snuffs out the wicks in his eyes.
Except that he moves and a face just like
his reckoned like him to stop all action
with a flick of finger on the trigger.