people **** people with nothing but fingers and hair and their very heavy breath. their breath like a crow beak before crucifixes of straw. like a tightening banishment of a lung. remember when we would blow it onto our car window and create that consistent mirth of fog to begin in?
the bodies riddled with bullets that flank the highway are no such thing. the schoolchildren lying face down in the corner of the closet are no such thing. they are just winter coats with schoolchildren to fill them for the time being. no amputation of what’s mine will aid them into the grave. no mass communication grief. so why would you call it a mass grave when in truth it was just a pit i dug to fill with crowds of people who died under the pretense that they had previously done so, that nothing was new under the sun.
and when people **** people like people do with their instruments as ways of extending themselves into the world and into the marrow of our body obliterating organs of people with their stretching of the muscular rib, shoulder. one eye closes firmly.
it’s nothing but a hand gun as if to say a hand eats the gun and makes it whole. as if to say the reinforced metal door exit plan for people who are being killed by other people clicked shut and locked 15,000 years ago and i can’t quit slamming what’s left of me into it.
your kid is very dead. but then again so is mine. suppose they killed each other. suppose they both made the mistake of dragging their small, stupid bodies through the trajectory of another body in the first place. in the chip aisle of a gas station maybe. in theaters this christmas. in the midst of a good song that began playing on the lobby radio just a minute before, oh yeah before, things really got going.
i saw people killing people on television the other day with their whole bodies, devouring themselves like surgical gloves slick with oiled consumption and bleeding out and i could do nothing. some kids died just because and they told me so and i was told nothing could ever help them because they were just people and they were dying.
“breaking news” ended up just being people again. in those moments, i was eating breakfast. our houses were very quiet and needed me in all of them, grandfather clock over CNN, clarifying what has already been committed and committed again. the cipher was others lost blood.