This is not atrocity
This is the basement
This is the sea receding like lips to reveal tooth-like shells
  
Amongst the bullet casings and corpses felled leaving the boats
This is the sand like an inverted moat around the
Kingdom at sea, and this is the Remainder.
   Yet they remain jubilantly-

Is this what being jubilant means?
Chamomile anklets adorning a hanged child.

This is not atrocity,
Ignorance wielding pitchforks and fire.
Anger alight and hostility riled
This is not atrocity.
This is not far from this reality;
Remember this child-
  
And the mob piled like tinder on themselves
Convincing carrion feeders
And unimpeded breeders that
Halt the march of science that
This is not atrocity.

The certain hot song by which Earth is greeted
Has an immediately recognizable tune.
And
This is not atrocity;
It sounds more like ******, ******.

But I can't hear it
And I have no fear anymore
I open my eyes to another routine killing, and I know-
      
This is atrocity-

But a necessary one.
It's hardly enough to stay alive
And as I and we strive for
Money and coffee and love,
I and we let
atrocity
enter us.
Climb into us like a hand does a glove,
or a puppet.
It is not nature;
Nor fate;
And one needn't be dead
to appreciate the ability to open the senses
and actually sense.

And this,
I am certain,
   Is not an atrocity