from freshman year (late 2012) in reaction to a school shooting...sadly there have been enough that I don't know which

School Shootings

The blood of the fallen is scattered. 

 It calls from the hearts of students and a teacher standing in the schoolyard. 

 It screams from the tiles and from the ground beneath. 

It burns in the eyes of a country.

The eyes of the fallen are closed now.

They do not see what a witness saw and they fail to take in the schoolyard.

They stare back at the years woven, the parents who made them.

A pluck broke the strings, strings of time

The tiles clean, the soil hidden from view.

Under the yard where hopers breathe abandoners air

voices from above shout all mistakes and breaking human mind.

There isn't any music.

Buried in metal that is witness to nothing

And it all seems so simple, a world displaced from a world

or an item moved from a store shelf

a lie transferred, hand to hand

and the soil ironed with a sprinkler.

Falling lead, the sound of nothing

the collapse (very old poem, ca. 2011; maybe even 2008/2009)

The collapse

I threw myself, hurtling, out of the dark cave

Where I had been hiding, imagining flights

And asking questions about a strange world.

There outside the cave, I found a set of books

Each striving to fill my brain, to prevent

Any other book from reaching in.

But I wouldn't have it.  I kept them all out.

I kept their knowledge where it was, and

I opened them when I needed to.

And what seemed like hours became days,

And what seemed like days became months.

As I became filled with the knowledge

Of what each book could tell me

And of nothing else.

One day, I grew bored of the books

And descended back into the cave.