1.
One could say, such things
just happen; or
one could say
that the way
the boy crumpled
leaking onto the floor of
the stairwell was irrelevant,

or that
the cop’s statement
that he thought he saw
a gun was relevant.

If one could find the CD
the boy was said
to be holding when he was shot,
one could see if the subject matter
of said CD
included guns,
or shooting,
and thus was relevant.

If one could be objective about
shit like this,
one could make up
a simple song
to commemorate the event.
It would have
a short verse and
the chorus would be over
in a heartbeat:

He was alive and
Then he was gone;
Such a smart kid who
Did nothing wrong.

That wasn’t enough.
So he fell down the stairs
With a bullet inside him
While everyone stared.

A gun or a wallet,
A smile or a knife.
What could he have used
To hold on to life?

If one could just get the facts elegantly straight,
if one could just learn
to sing
correctly,

this would be a different world.

2.
Do you recall

Maggie Apple lying in the street
with her eggshell nails
and her skinny legs with
the calves that looked
as if they’d been attached to her bones
as an afterthought;

or old Ronald Wrong
whose house smelled of wine but
looked like a glove full of bees, so when they
banged down the door and a host of trouble flew out
of its ramshackle fingers they
shot him as if he were
a queen, a danger queen;

or any one of those salty throated
boys and girls
who put their breath
in just the wrong place at the wrong
time so that magic stopped working,
and they died ahead of the rest of the pack?

The same lights flashing, the same crowd
gathered, tonight feels the same:
the names must be changed to protect
the names alone, because
the innocent are never saved.

3.
I want these days
to be over. I want sleep
to come back,
the shocked faces to stop staring,
and all the color to drain up from the roof
into the sky again, where it belongs.

4.
If he had known what was going to happen,
he would never have gone up to the roof
at all. It was just a quick way to the next building.
It was never meant to be a destination.

5.
The single worst part of all of this
is that anyone could have told you
this was going to happen.