when the bullet flies, we will not catch it

Selfishly, reality must be stopped, somehow

It is clashing with these carefully crafted dream worlds

Worlds built through years of running and lying and hiding away

And I want it to stop, to suspend, to cease

I remember the days before my screen began looking like a loved one

And feeling like a safe space to rest my heart and soul

When I hold it, sometimes it feels like a person, holding so much of myself within it

Other times, when its heat burns my palm, it feels like I am embracing the enemy

I suppose both can be true, though I don’t know where to move or persist without it

I base myself on all I see there, and I see it all, a constant chase for newness

A deep, eternal well of opinions I steal and hold close to my chest like a child

When did I forget to think for myself?

It seems foreign, to believe in something bigger than myself for the sake of honesty

I have never been good at knowing myself

Or with knowing where, exactly, to place my feet or my mind, or my heart

But I have seen too much, as we all have

And how can chronic exposure to this world around us be seen as trauma?

So I shrug it off

The mutilated corpses imprinted in my brain

The hateful words and actions, the human condition at its worst

The screams of the innocent and of the guilty

The lies we tell, the worlds we make

The things we believe and the way they end up broken without fail

The throbbing, hopeless emptiness of the living and the dead

I dream of strange things these days

Poets and kings, vikings and gods

Power beyond understanding, knowledge beyond reality

Apathetic eyes, perhaps my own, stare into my soul

As if to ask me, what can you do?

Rather, what will you do?

I awake each morning in a paralyzed stupor

I will live and die without these answers

Some days, I am revived and honest and free

But it is no matter how tall I stand, how low I sink, how little I matter

Bullets still litter the floors of American schools, rifles pushed against gym lockers

Parents shriek louder than their babies these days

Childhood homes rendered broken

A woman shoved against the ground

A man atop her mounted like a wild animal

As a million echoed voices cheer him on

A mother’s cold stare pierces me from across a hundred hallways

The homeless stare me down with thousands of eyes and empty hands

Their lips are cracked and broken open, bleeding on the filthy streets

I worked thirty-four hours this week

And I have only four dollars to give them, tucked into the crevices of my right hand between my fingers

They grasp at my hand until it’s gone from my wrist, the skin rubbed raw to the bone

The monster smiles up at us, grey-haired and cynical, well-kept and discreet

Buried with all his many secrets never told

Politicians pray, closed-eyed to the bodies of Gazan children still limp in the rubble

Still bleeding, still dying, still never enough

Screams die in my throat with them, gone with the wind even as the smoke clears

Ghosts will walk these soulless cities and reach for our throats, throttling us until we choke

Until we see what has become of us

A child’s gun cocks again, a familiar sound; I watch the bullet fly, for I can do nothing more

Blood gushes from a man’s neck, a man I always hated

Yet I cry for him, a silent, single tear

For the present and future rooted in this cruel and banal reality

Stripped down to its feral, fatal bareness

Like a pencil split down the middle