Don’t Ask Me What I Think.

Do not ask me what I think.
What I feel.
I am angry. I am forlorn.
More children dead.
More and more.
Again and again.
Predictable politicians telling me
what they will not do.
Indignant that we would want to do anything.
A familiar pattern of neglect.
Don’t feed them.
Don’t educate them.
Don’t let them be children, safe and joyful.
Don’t treat their bodies.
Don’t treat their mental illnesses
unto they are ruined all together
and become the very killers we wring our hands over.
And whatever you do, don’t count the bodies
of the decades of death,
Don’t give them names.
Wait long enough, and people will forget,
and cast their votes one more time
for the quietly complicit,
the circus performers who live in the spotlight
and ignore the dark corners
where the bodies lay.

About this poem

Nominally about the shooting in Texas yesterday. But really about the larger issue of why this keeps happening and why we spend so much TV time talking about what we won’t do, without doing anything.

I am angry, frustrated, deeply sad, and discouraged.

Tom

PS: The picture is legal stock photography. Not one of mine.