The Mass Shooting Sequence
I.
Somewhere today is not the day their thoughts
imagined. It is draped in the sinewed
muscle of a policeman who daubs
tears from his eyes, seeing slaughter. Renewed
belief in human goodness becomes an
arduous reexamination and
grief, failed human empathy, succumbed and
suffocated by the self-serving hand
of the NRA and the greed of gun
makers and perpetrators of myths:
the mass shooting, one lone misstep, among
ten uncounted seconds, or more, dismissed.
Somewhere the day they thought it would be is
drowned in oblivion's self-serving fist.
II.
Now they will be telling the world just who
the victims are. The lawn chairs blown to bits,
yes, their bodies riddled with bullets, too,
how old they were, if there were little kids
with them who also were ripped apart by
the delirious-looking man's assault
weapon. Now they will tell us the heart's side,
who they leave behind and quickly. The fault
will be placed on the mental illness of
the young man, who found the gun he wanted
the most. Now they photograph the stillness
of it, the NRA speaks, soon, undaunted.
It's like the stillness has dropped from their mind,
like a stone, a drowned body no one finds.
III.
The stillness after the mass shooting is
the time of immobility because
now the people cannot move, they list
to the side each of them fell on. We fall
aimless, when the body becomes lifeless,
its intent lost to the splay of bullets
from the shooter's weapon. Now the time best
spent, listening, where there's no sound, pull its
last drops from the air, which cannot be breath
now. In the stillness it is clearer, now.
The explosion's detritus has now left
the air, fallen to the ground, nearer now.
After this life is siphoned off, the killed
innocence makes no sound, no blood to spill.