July 20, 2012
Something massive—the unbearable and impossible
of violence, random and ugly—big,
bigger than the hole in my chest—bigger than the stall
of my mind—bigger, even, than all the words.
I am without recourse, without exit strategies, strategies
of any kind—my mind and body colliding
bursting for beauty or love or forget
like a man held deep under water.
This is drowning—struggling to empathize with a man eating
the face of another man—or with the bikers, gripping their
handlebars,
glimpsing, riding on—or even with the boy two bowls stoned,
watching the youtube surveillance video in a cold apartment
he shares with his father, who will wake him one morning
to explain there was another shooting in Colorado, at the
premier
of a superhero movie, and that twelve humans are dead
this instant for that reason, and his voice will tremble
not with those specifics but with everything that burdens—
the senseless, the horrific, the daunting, the inevitable—
the heavy and the unyielding.
