"Demons run when a good man goes to war
Night will fall and drown the sun
When a good man goes to war
Friendship dies and true love lies
Night will fall and dark will rise
When a good man goes to war
Demons run but count the cost
The battle is won but the child is lost
When a good man goes to war"

The look you gave me reminded me of
when you found out about the boy
at space camp.

It reminded me of when you sent me the
message saying, "I'll call you when I get home."
And then you proceeded to angrily cry and
sob in your room over FaceTime with me and
ask over and over again,
"How could you?".

It reminded me of the look you gave me that made me realize
that I had messed up so badly.
I had ripped your heart out
and when I realized that,
I wouldn't have blamed you for saying goodbye to me
right then and there.

You didn't, and I know you regret it.
I'm sorry.
I don't know what else to say.
I'm still here wishing I had made better choices.
I'm still wishing that I had held you closer sometimes, too.
You probably regret it all.
You'd rewrite that ending, wouldn't you?

God, that look...that look.
I pretended like it didn't break my heart
but I can promise you that it
did.

When I was a little kid
My friends and I would play
At cowboys and Indians
In the barn with forts of hay.
We crafted guns from sticks
We found about the farm
And though we shot each other
We managed to come to no harm.

Bang, bang, bang! I got you!
No you didn’t, you missed!
The bullet whizzed by me!
You can’t see me in the mist!

Of course, if we were Indians
The same rules held true there.
You never managed to **** us
We never took your hair.
But, we knew we were villains
Because cowboys were king.
We didn’t even question it.
It was that sort of thing.

Bang, bang, bang. I got you!
Cowboys don’t ever cry.
We twist and dodge you redskins
So, don’t even bother to try.

Holding invisible reins, we rode
On our noble painted steeds.
We pretended it was the old West
Here in our playground of weeds.
Some of us had play weapons
Santa had brought to the lucky
But forcing improvisation only
Made us a lot more plucky.

Bang, bang, bang. I shot you.
You ***** lowdown rustler.
Oh, we thought of every dodge.
What young, clever hustlers.

I watched my father scrunch his eyebrows together
whenever my mother said something he didn't like,
his impatience seeping through his dark skin,
apparent in the way he turned his body away
as if he wanted to run from all this
but he's trapped now, trapped forever.
I listened as my mother told me she did not want to stay
and my brother and I are the only things anchoring her unto this godforsaken house
of peeling white paint and crumbling walls and endless shouts and burning words.
I watched them hold each other when things got tough
and I knew it wasn't because of love—
it was because they were the nearest things to each other.
At a very young age I knew love was something that dissolves,
a flower you water everyday,
a story you never stop writing,
And some people, they don't know,
that they have stopped watering,
and they're running out of ink, only on page 3.
Little girl me knew.
Big girl me continues to watch it unfold,
dead petals in their hair
and dark ink between their fingers—
dry

You stumble out a dry cleaners
Or a 24-7 convenience store
And with your weapon of choice
You brandish and challenge
The chains of the legal system
For a little profit or as you deem
Method of survival.

Somewhere between buying a gun
Finding a gun, or owning a gun
You forgot what it was like
To be a caring brother,
To be a worrying father,
To be a loving mother,
To be an innocent sister,
And when you finally,
Look the eyes of the
about to be soulless,
As you let off alarms,
That ring more than just pain
And blood,
But rings of
your own
guilty conscience,
And heartache for the victim,
You have forgotten what it's like
To be a part of humanity.