There is a pattern.
There is a recipe.
There is an outline.
There is nothing new.
We have sewn this before.
We have cooked this up.
We have sketched it out.
It’s as old as Columbine.
It is older.
There’s no such thing as a disturbed lone gun man
when there are so many disturbed young men.
We feed our children a steady diet of violence against women, children, themselves, ourselves.
We make violence our entertainment.
We shout kill them on football fields.
We hunt down wild animals.
We cage domestic.
We make violence our metaphor and our reality.
And call it barbaric when it’s a sword to the head.
We call it nothing when it’s a gun to the heart.
There is no correlation between the writing on the wall
and the posters in their bedrooms
and those desktop file folders full of hate
We make it our talking point after the weather.
We blame it on mental illness.
We take away social studies and citizenship.
It’s each of us for ourselves.
It keeps us pull up your own bootstraps hard
But we can’t afford the boots.
We can afford the ammo though.
We are responsible until we aren’t.
We kill the messengers
We harbor the guilty
This is our home invasion
No foreigner needed to climb a wall
This is our home invasion
He is always quiet
He always keeps to himself
His parents were always there
His teachers always saw the signs
He is always young
He is always right; almost always white
Him and that gun, him and that gun
and we buy him burgers and empty suggestions
and go numb and dumb and numb and dumb
into that good night.
