We enumerate them on monuments,
silent ossuaries to the past.
We struggle over nomenclature
and search for heroes
to soothe our wounds.
We stack them like cordwood
beside the borrowed tomb
until their names carry no meaning:
San Ysidro and Killeen.
We weep deep into the shadowy night
but lament not our true loss.
The mourner's sackcloth
transformed into the toreador's cape.
We fashion grief into grenades;
our sorrow into salvos.
Our necks bent
with the weight of our words.
We march, as if our footsteps in procession
can silence the throbbing drumbeat within.
Columbine and Fort Hood.
We launched, with microphones as mortars;
turning our rage to the mirror.
'Murderers' we named.
'A return to tyranny' we predicted.
We posted and commiserated
to our cheering tribes
til our ears, satiated by the cacophony,
fell deaf into the realm of dream.
Ashes and despair
over Siloam and upon those
souls beneath
yet the world spins ever on.
Tyre and Sidon repent
while we dance
to the enchanting melody
of complacency and self-righteousness,
content in our moral superiority.
We are mentors, not monsters, after all.
Sandy Hook and Orlando.
If one were to walk
down the stone-lined archways tonight
beside those tear-stained ebenezers and solemn masonry
and by chance paused to read
a name:
Las Vegas and Parkland,
what would he hear?
Silence.
No mourner's wail.
no children's laughter,
only the still, small, pestilent
beat of our own degenerate heart.
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