A Pair Of Poems, A Pair Of Tragedies

Lucky

Wrong place, wrong time, still lucky

60 minutes earlier

Manhattan bound instead of Brooklyn bound

Front of the train instead of back of the train

1 man

1 gun

A lot of hate

I do not blame him

29 people were unlucky

Nobody was supremely unlucky

Between 35th and 36th on 4th ave

8:24 am, April 12th, 2022

So close to home

And the conversations

The lockdown

The buss

The food

And the end

Moving on to talk about it again

Sometime in the future

Another bloody pearl on a bloodsoaked string

That stretches back through decades

Decades marked by muzzle flashes

Lives upheaved

Lockdowns

Drills

Preparing for a day we pray will never comes

And yet comes for all too many people

They gawk

They look

They make promises

They all blend together

Parkland

Uvalde

Buffalo

Pulse Nightclub

Club Q

Sandy Hook

In a world gone mad, luck is an optimist’s farce

If it bleeds, it leads

[The sun isn’t even down]

The sun isn’t even down

And they’re already counting the bodies

The vultures have come

To total

To compare

To perpetuate this godforsaken cycle

To make spectacle of crime

Of death

3 women, 3 children

Who cares any fucking more

It should be fucking none

If it bleeds it leads

And nothing bleeds more than head wounds

Like on a child

Except there isn’t much bleeding to be done once they’re dead

But then they can siphon the blood

And write their headlines in it

Nobody is more guilty in this than those who profit from it

Get in the way

It is not the person who pulled the trigger

But the legions of lobbyists

Who prevented laws passed which would have removed the gun from their hands

Before it even got to this point

Or similar laws to reduce the number out there to begin with

It’s the lawmakers who allow themselves to be seduced by this legalized corruption

To abandon and betray those who rely on them

All in the name of a few extra dollars

That’s what it’s all about

A societal agreement

That people go to war over

It can be excused as

Self-righteous belief

But even that is backed by the real green devil

These poems are about a pair of mass shootings that happened about a year apart that both impacted me. The first one happened during Senior year of high school for me. I’m writing an article about it actually. I have no idea when that will be finished, but it will include a breakdown of that poem, commentary on why it never really hit the news, and some other stuff. The shooting happened near my high school.

The second poem is about the shooting in Nashville that happened back in late March of 2023. I have a friend that I met in HS that moved to Nashville, so I was immediately worried about her when I learned what had happened. It nearly was my last poem cause I had a panic attack and nearly killed myself when I heard that it was committed by a trans person cause I knew how certain people were going to paint it.