Active Shooter

An original poem.

Bar the doors
Everyone under your desks
Be still
Quiet now
Quiet

Hide where?

Where tanks roll
and bombs fall
and fields burn
and flies gather?

Hide under desks?

There’s no school left
no hospital
no home
nowhere to hide

where pipes run dry
and shelves are bare,
where bodies are maimed
and children starve

Don’t call it genocide,
someone might notice

Quiet children
Please
Please be quiet

Quiet how?

When vans appear
and masked men
tear wailing families
in two

when Empire–
its guns,
blasts,
shrieks,
roars–
when ravenous Empire
never sleeps

Quiet?

The clanking, grinding gears
of this death machine
cover everything
everywhere

The classroom door rattles

See?
It’s here, too

Hush children
Shhhh
Shhhhhhhh

Suits and ties
brandish their cherished
deadly things–
point them,
hurl them,
spend them

Their machine
burns every fuel,
billows choking clouds–
smoke and blood

Gunworshipping
suits and ties
drunk on power
fattened on human sacrifice
child sacrifice

Suits and ties
scream
with one voice

Pile them higher
More bodies
More
Higher
I said higher
Higher, damn you

Do you not know
I am
your god

Build my holy mountain