Peace Talks

“The most immediate hurdle:
getting the two sides into the same room.”

That seems so obvious: I can’t even keep track
of which one feels more aggrieved

or which has more right to their pain,
as if pain was a fundamental right.

Then again,
that’s the fundamental problem:  that each side

feels its right to the title of victim
has been more compromised.  If God or anyone

knows how to tally that, he or she
ought to weigh in with something

everyone can agree on, a bar graph
explaining how much blood has been spilled

across the ages by the gallon, and have them
initial it, the way the doctors gather

and initial a body before they begin to cut,
claiming their territory, making sure they’ve got it right

and that nothing unnecessary happens. 
But that’s at the very least unlikely.  Instead the two sides,

drunk on anger and history, mistaking skin
for parchment and bone for flagpoles,

will likely slash with sharp pens at imagined borders,
then stand up thumping their chests

from the butcher block
to huff away into their bunkers and push pins into maps,

maps that will bleed again soon enough and spoil the carpets
in a safe room where everyone once gathered

ostensibly to heal faraway patients who, as always, will wonder
when they’ll ever be asked into the meeting room to speak

of a third side, the one made up of bodies
covered with mazes of bold initials and jagged scars.