A child walks into a school without his homework,
with a cat for show and tell, with a joint
in her pocket, with a black eye from his father,
eating a piece of pizza, wanting to be kissed
for the first time, planning to skip third period,
holding a semi-automatic rifle, practicing French,
"Je m'appelle Michelle", practicing being bold
in front of class when he talks about the exports
of Brazil, wearing the ugly dress her mother gave her
for Christmas, trying to channel Lady Gaga,
intending to kill as many people as he can.
All of these are boring now, common, normal
American moments, as are these: her daughter will die
every day for the rest of her life, shot again
when she wakes, or maybe as long as it takes
to get to the bathroom and pee, or to the coffee maker,
her car, even all the way to lunch, making this one murder
thousands of murders ten years from now, twenty,
murders her memory will be guilty of, a haunting
of her clothes, her house, her breath. Imagine someone saying
we can't do anything about cancer, booze, smack,
high blood pressure, floods, car accidents, falls
from ladders, falls from ambition, though
the shrugging over guns, if accumulated,
if all the shoulders of senators and presidents
were added together, could lift the moon. If the world
made sense, it wouldn't be this world,
it would be elsewhere and we'd wonder
how we got there, if we belonged, if we were dead
and heaven had found us, kissed us with a dream
on our foreheads and sent us to perfect,
waking sleep. But we don't have to worry about that.