Originally posted 1/30/2004.

Anyone
could have told you
it was going to happen,
because it always happens —

perhaps they happen,
one could say, because
such things
just happen; just as 

one could say
that the fact that it was 
a brown teenage boy once again
who had crumpled leaking
onto the floor of
the stairwell was irrelevant,
or the way

one could say
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.

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?

One could say — in fact,
it is a certainty
that someone believes this,
and will say it —
one could say that 
if we all could just learn
to sing such a song
correctly,
this would be
a different world — 

a world where
Maggie Apple
would never have ended up
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;

a world where no one
would never have killed Ronald Wrong
whose house smelled of wine but
looked like a glove full of bees, so that
when they banged down the door
and a host of tiny troubles 
flew out of its ramshackle fingers
they felt like they had to 
shoot him down as if he were
a queen, a danger queen;

a world where any one
of those dead
salty-throated 
boys and girls
weren’t in the wrong place
at the wrong time;

a world where their mothers’ magic 
had never stopped working
and they did not die ahead
of the rest of the pack.

Instead, though, in spite of
all the songs,
there is this – 

the same lights flashing again,
the same crowd gathering again,
a new name pulsing, a new verse
linked forever to an old refrain.

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 final destination.

But anyone 
could have told him
it was going to happen,
because it always happens.

The only thing that changes
is the names,
the names that are customarily changed
to protect the innocent.

One could say it does not appear
to be working.
One could say it is not the innocent
who appear to be protected.