Losses

 

What are we doing

 

Shootings in a night club

In Orlando

A home of amusement

Parks that invite many

To play-worlds

 

What kind of patterned,

Surrender of sanity

Are we about, call it

Terror or derangement

Or “just a family thing”

 

A singer shot

The other night

In the Florida

City, too

She might have

Been smiling

As a blessing,

Flush from

Performing,

Just before

 

We lose and lose

Blood and life and ground

The earth of reason

Climbs away, above a

Plain of misery

 

I watch and read the

News in my small

Region

 

Where grown-ups

Are shot and children

Are abused, as if

By grinning devils or

Their supplicants

 

The Eumenides must weep

They do not demand

Or negate choice—they

Simply weave our

Threads of fate from

 

Which we have co-opted

Furies-cutting

 

We do these things,

And is there such disparity:

 

A world of who-has

Living behind a barrier

Of wealth and fantasy

And hired protection

(So to say)

 

Until distance is broken

Through

 

Fear, isolated penury,

And vacuum-thinking

Shooting, burning through

 

Shattering separation

In a final, violating way

 

Until from lives

Destroyed, death layers

Everyone on a field

Of weeds

 

Weeds for mundane death,

For funeral-attending

 

We are all equal now