Kids with guns
playing hostage outside
my kitchen window
trapping their sister in the chicken coop
behind the tenement house

Kids with funds
riding scholarships to Harvard
saying someday I’ll be the one
who pushes that little red button

Kids with needles
saying at the end of all this
I will wine and dine the devil
to persist my own mess
they go off so silently

we all turn to memory
and fade to the black flickering
insides of eyelids and run out film reels
the bottom of oceans and the bedrock of glaciers
the whole earth will hum for half a second
before the next bang hits