Newtown

 Newtown

There is no logic in most death, no why to put under the pillow

The possibility floats around us like all the air that is not oxygen

Intake the inverse; we inhale what cannot translate into continuation

We process systematically.  The monster is dead. 

Randomness is confined into a narrative that can fit into a coffin of memory

This can happen.  This cannot happen. 

This happens in Gaza.  This happens in Connecticut.

This is an organism that interprets death like a grocery list

I choose to purchase only these items in my cart

Somehow the anomaly is bagged, taken home and regrets ensue

The poison is in the wine

Antidotes are searched for in the cupboards

Nutritional labels and recipes are re-read

Yet somehow on this day the system has a hole

So we gape at it with frazzled awe attempting to fill the void

With enough talk so that the wound becomes cauterized by the gawk-caulk

It is the same reason that we slow on the interstate to stare at a wrecked vehicle

Another not-us commuter, passing, making lists that were interrupted

Never to be filled with the composition of bagged items that morning intended

Childhood ended abruptly for elementary school survivors in a conversation

To recognize the sentiment that will sit on the ledge of their brain

Every day in perpetuity as they return to that building, that classroom

Left without time to grab a coat; or in turn ended with never breathing outside again

The pantomime of trying to fit blame in a value-meal-sized drive-through bag will vomit

Profusely for weeks like a gagging parent watching his kindergartener eat lunch

Knowing her arms and height cannot logistically perform the Heimlich maneuver on an adult

Father tries to talk to her, but nothing feels appropriate to emit, 
A daughter can not help her daddy rekindle her illusion of a simple world

Because he knows there is nothing anyone can do 

A law, a fence, a prison, a drug: each are fallow pesticides

So he gawks and she grows up to gawk and stare at mangled automobiles on roadsides
Somewhere introversion is being blamed for all this madness

Someone brings up God, someone brings up the Second Amendment

Someone says shut the fuck up, someone says let me think about it for a minute

And the roux just keeps thickening and some kid in Gaza asks who paid for the bomb

That killed my dad, That killed my sister, That leveled my school

And I watch, I gawk in silence over in my hole

Knowing if this random image of a shooter who mauled down five-year-olds

Turns out to hold a different skin tone or religion, then the one of most of the people in the Connecticut parking lot then that shit would magically turn into an international incident

Humans would start searching for answers about the fucked-up mind

Of some count of free-willed humans and that is how America ends up

In Iraq and Afghanistan breeding children who grow up to think like we do

And all of that is because we stare at wrecked bodies with crushed trunks and torsos 
News reels parade for Viagra ad-spots pimping apple-faced still-photographs
Castigate machine-gun Jokers who just want to watch the world burn
Outline a psychiatric profile to make the acid more palatable

Try to make sense of violence against the peaceful and violence against the violent

Revenge bullets spray like sperm breeding vengeance in the sons of the deceased

All because somebody needs a box, a damn coffin to bury the fearful part of ourselves

That screams out onto the ledge of our minds when we walk into our version of the classroom

The next day back at school that we are okay now, we have a reason inscribed

That this shit will never happen again, not here, not to us, because we figured out what caused it

That thought is what launches white-flight to suburban American communities

To run away from poverty and crime and the exponential randomness of the drug war

Confirmed the monster is dead, don’t be touching me now, terrorists are vanquished

Understand understanding is a progression based in consciousness

Potential evil that is feared breathes in each of us too

The carbon dioxide emitted occurs as a mandatory subcomponent of our continuation

To stop the out is to end the in, if one narrows fear to an illusion of compromise, then

We exchange consciousness for abdication of possibility

So that when an anomaly outside the spectrum of what is deemed acceptable

Intersects with our normality we explode into a panic to expel the cancer into a void

Which we do not consider to include ourselves, yet it does

The universe that propels a man to walk into a school and point a gun at a kid 
Writing a list on looseleaf in crayon includes each of us; 

It does so, so that we do not extract the choices 

We make by abdication to a collective; we must internalize inherent free-will

And own it in black and white; that we each choose

That is the end of all rabble-rabble, the end of gawk,
The end of staring at mashed pick-up trucks on highways

The end is the choice; that is it, no reason, only choice

And that father still knows, there is not a damn thing he can do