How Much Tremor There Will Be
How quickly links move me through our country, first
thin reports, then the crowds redacted by smoke —
how slow the time for the boy left in the street.
I want to say it sears the mind, the burnt-out
canisters shown lying around their feet, shot
into people’s lawns. (Go home. I am home. You
go the fuck home.) To do that, to stare into
submission while looking through the narrowing
scope — but not visible. How else to explain
that the eye rests there, holds fast the line cutting
against their refusal? Bring it, you fucking
animals caught on the hot mic. We see you.
We see you, the cameras would say and still
they advance; one shouts a barrel in a face,
eye against eye and the fragile feel of it.
No eyes meeting real eyes, though, just the gauzy
film like cool milk poured into burning orbits,
like something smeared out of an infected root,
while the bewildered mouth’s pressed into a plea —
“I can’t breathe” — under the civic body’s brute
enforcement. Justice? Look beneath your boot’s tread,
but see, there’s nothing to take back, nothing left
to exchange. That’s the lesson’s broken-glass edge,
that out from this lens appears simply a shape,
a description and you invoking it, where
he resists, charges, grabs at his waistband, and
you rest your cheek as in lining up the sights
or in going to sleep. He will never wake.
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