VA

Hard plastic stocks sizzle and smoke, bullets spin, killers grin and then cry. Guns recoil, blood boils, moms want for their babies and the babies can muster no heroics for their fallen friends. Stupid death lies upon rural America.

Hunts ensue, justice stalking captures. Past bloody brick and faces weathered and sick a nation further numbed to its atrophy. It's what we never dream of and a concentrated form of what we ignore.

A mother's hands grips, like hell's gates, the shoulders of her son. Mascara's like the runny soot of the fire that burns behind her eyes. Her release leaves creases in his sweatshirt, and small shadows are cast across him in the low morning sun. Fear and paranoid relief will haunt her the rest of her days. A form of sorrow lies, collapsed, convusling in her sobs like no one is there; her insides are desolate, lonelier than she'd been this morning, a broken mother begs to be so lcuky as fear and paranoia. But her womb has been insulted, her livelihood ignored and shit upon by elements of arrogant power and evil. Mortality invited her here and she was given no option to decline.

Unbelieving fathers stand motionless, staring at and refusing to be moved by story tellers that must be lying. The most horrible lies. Lies about death and pain and terror. They degrade to silence and solitude; they hear only the most pitiful voices of motivation echo inside. Their pummeled hearts promise vengeance but their mind can neither reconcile desie to action nor stay the heart's cries enough to speak sense. How empty, and yet so congested, their lives have now become.

Our insides are reduced to personal chaos. Our inhibitions and aspirations mutually decay. We move to a place we feel necessary - a field where its only us, an expanse of tranquil independence that requires no outward focus and seems the only refuge from horror. Our spirit can't afford to care, the costs are too much.

And so parts of nearby worlds hurt more but we're hanging on to silent fields of peaceful grasses - bolt the doors, close the gates, shut the windows, no one enters our refuge. We are no longer wild but we are forever sheltered. Grandmas and grandpas and little sisters and nephews and uncles, cousins, moms, dads, and brothers thrash at our door with their tears and their questions and we wince and cry back and apologize so profusely while we fight to bolt and rebolt and bolt again the doors we've constructed. The world must not get in; it will bring its guns and its horror and its stupid death into our field. Our fileds would burn. So lets walk off these sidewalks. Leave the motionless form in the grass to cry for herself and her baby, forget the images now singed into hundreds of young minds. Retire to our fields to look at our synthetic sunsets, skies birds and vices.