maybe in poetry

maybe I am damned to write
another heartbroken poem after
every senseless massacre that
the American cult of the gun
causes and then bullies us
into never doing anything about

this time it was Las Vegas, I guess
it all blurs together when you’re stuck
writing out the anguish and horror
every single time it happens then
every next time it happens then
every next next time it happens and
once again the blood money bribes are passed out
once again the selfish redneck assholes speak
their preference to having their murder buttons
that make their penises feel larger and
the power fantasies that come with the them
above people not being slaughtered every other week
clinging to eighteenth century legal briefs
written with quill on goddamned parchment
to defend their selfishness and sickened worldview

nope, they yell, smiling like hateful idiots
my right to kill in an instant is more important
than all those dead today and two weeks ago and
in two weeks and in four weeks and on and on
if we had a national conscience in America
after all those children died in Sandy Hook
we would’ve had a smelter pop up in every town and
we would’ve watched the horror burn away
but we don’t

in this supposedly Christian nation
the cult will happily worship the Golden Calf of gun
their burnt offerings left all over the floors
of schools and offices and restaurants and homes
we are the sacrifices to their altar
of paranoid power and cowboy bullshit cockflappery
we are dying and they smile
mention how men who never saw anything more than a musket
wrote a piece of paper that says they can have AK-47s and
I realize that we are not evolved enough as humans
morally or ethically or spiritually or intellectually
to have something that can murder at a finger’s twitch
without driving us utterly mad and
without slaughtering senselessly all the fucking time
we are not far enough away from our
animal territorial squabbles in caves and trees
to use such a monstrous responsibility
in anything other than unspeakable ways

so I will write this poem or something like it
as I have since my cousin was murdered
by a man who could get a gun in the middle
of his schizophrenic break
again and again and again and again
it will be Las Vegas today
it was Columbine, it was San Bernadino
the names will change, the places
but the blood money bastard will buy it all off and
the power-crazed apes will yell about their
freedom to have an instant murder button in their pocket and
I will keep writing this poem until the day I die
or until the day this ends and
surely, I will die first
the fear apes and the soulless business profiting off them
will keep the fix in

my heart will yell “NO ONE SHOULD EVER HAVE TO KNOW THIS FEELING!”
my fingers will type
some fear apes will gloat that they keep getting to jack off
to their bang-bang kill ‘um bad guys daydreams
some suits will spread a little of their money to Congress
and then it will repeat

or maybe this is my damnation and
I will live forever to write this poem every time
until the shootings stop or
the human race dies out from all the shooting
three humans left on the earth, myself one
then a murder-suicide by the other two monkeys and
I get to write this poem one last time
having to walk the earth until that day
like the Wandering Jew of European myth
wearing out shoes until we all kill each other dead
writing this poem again and again and again
with my heavy heart and my worn-out shoes and
this hands helpless to change a thing
maybe
maybe maybe maybe