Extreme Sports by Stuart K. Polzin USMC

 
life’s become such a sterile stretch
that everybody’s taking up
extreme sports as if they’re possessed
by some kind of death wish,
all the while knowing there’s
a team of doctors and an ambulance
sitting on the playing field
ready within seconds to tend
to their petty self-inflicted wounds,
which reminds me of this corpsman
who thought he could run fifty yards
through intense machine gun fire
to reach Woody, our pointman,
who’d already left for the showers
but the doc didn’t know that
until he joined him
about ten yards short of the goal,
and things really got extreme
when the medevac  took a mortar round
that crippled its tail rotor
like some tinkertoy pinwheel
that had been stepped on,
I wonder why the Networks
don’t hold their next competition
in Sniper’s Alley in Sarajevo?
 
that would be extreme.