Colorado

Thank god it was news

And not something you learned of later

A sidenote in someone else’s history

Thank god that it breaks hearts

That we call it what it is

A crime, a tragedy

Thank god we know it happened

And we don’t call it a joke

Pretend it doesn’t matter

Once, nobody cried when our lives were cut short

Once, daring to live your life meant you 

Deserved such a death

Destroyed in the act of acceptance

Immolated by a false fear

This underhanded belief 

masking itself as love

Yet our lives still matter less

Yet still we mourn

We rage

We do not deserve this

This death

These denials

Here, we stand

Here and now

No defeat

No erasure

No surrender

It is you who made this a war

It is you who are defeated

When all we ever wanted was peace

(June 2023)

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This is not the most sophisticated poem, in that it makes its claims more overtly than others I have written.  The power of poetry is its ability to sidestep a facet of society and/or the human experience, not to avoid it but to observe it differently. 

Black and white divisions are for chessboards, not for people.   The natural world is characterized by permeable membranes.  Things must pass into you, out of you, through you, in order for you to be alive.  Parts of you are always dying and other parts being reborn and the idea that anything is static is simply that, an idea which says nothing about how reality actually behaves. 

The opposite of freedom isn’t imprisonment, it’s surveillance.