A single mother
Shot twice in the back of the head
For twenty dollars crumpled away in her pocket
Sweat
Accumulated from a twelve hour shift
Soaks first
The ***** bill itself (then the jeans of the perpetrator)
As his sneakers depart the newly developed crime scene.
The woman
Bleeding out in the street
Becomes trivial talk over family dinner

These things happen.

A priest is beaten to his knees
Symbolic representation of
Pleading
To a higher power.
Prayers fly first
From his mouth (then hit ground level)
Where they meet his teeth,
Both of which scatter the parking lot.
A rosary becomes his focus while three men escape
Taking only his
Wallet and a sense of security.

These things happen.

A girl looms over the eighth floor balcony
As she counts every passerby below, first
In her head (then again out loud.)
Emotion becomes causation split second
Everything inside spontaneously
Bursts
Pooling blood mimics graffiti wings across pavement.
Her quick descent becomes gossip
Among school yards.

These things happen.

Muscles flex firm in my jawline
Visual declaration of what my brain is processing
When you casually say
“These things happen”.
Somehow
You manage to justify pointless tragedies
Dismissing them as facts of life
While I boil away in hand made paranoia.
These things don’t just happen.
First
There is cause (then there’s effect).

See
I can’t accept the notion
That walking out your front door every morning
Is some Darwin's gamble
If that’s what it all comes down to
Reproduction and survival
I probably won’t place any bets
Because I refuse to accept
“That’s just how the world works”

“You’re being childish”
She says to a child.
In my mind,
That suited this particular situation better than
Sitting in grief stricken silence
While the steady beat of the ECG by your bedside replaced the noise of conversations lost.

Showing that I was sad
Wouldn’t changes these circumstances,
Wouldn’t raise your body from the stark sheets that matched your skin in tone and texture,
Wouldn’t prove to some all-knowing God that this was unfair,
Certainly wouldn’t make anyone feel better.

Even then,
I knew there were different words for the same thing.
I knew the feeling of lungs giving out after a solid-steel punch to the gut
Was synonymous with the realization there would be no more palm tree Christmases in Leesburg.
I knew the ache after falling off the front porch balcony coincided with
The spasms of remorse I felt knowing I’d missed the chance to apologize for every pocket sized mistake I’d made.
And I knew that not having the capability to convey these words with my 8 year old vocabulary,
Meant I was childish.¬

No one wants unnecessary risks, with the path as wide as a hair,
But we might be leaving tomorrow.
A language disorder.
The labyrinth of an emotional mind.
The uncertainty that you are no longer a meaningful form,
Built on the tension of mental velocities.
A sequence of words affects a person’s ability to understand,
Modifying a flow of uncertainty to find the proper balance.
Without guides, have nothing but courage.
Become Mars, dripping in gore
Become the atomic bomb, with an audible breath
Become self-sustained
Scare the daylights out of them.

I’ll never be able to lace words strategically with my mouth
As easily as you can hold your head high.
And as you search for your own future
I’ll be choking down my own tongue
Because I always thought
If I talked about all the great things I could do in my life,
They would somehow magically present themselves in the order I’d imagined.
Now everything is tangled together
There’s no consistency to my thoughts
There’s no promise for my future.
But oh
You stand tall
And I get to watch you succeed in the ways
I’d only said I would.

Nostalgia is
Clumps of brown sugar in your oatmeal.
Hurts you teeth to bite down,
But it's sugary sweet,
And good for mornings staring into your bowl.
You never really realize how watered down nostalgia is
When you can always add more sweetener
While trying to remember why it was so good in the first place.