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Orlando poem

Mike Thompson

Terrible,
Terrible tragedy,
With so much to say,
So much to think about,
And so much to feel for,

I’ve been hearing the poetry,
The works,
And the comments pulled up out of the carnage,
Tearing into heart strings
And snapping them up as violin wire
Bound up into our throats
As we cry out these panic attacks
And enraged sobs
In memory of so many lost
And in tragic respect given to those
That have to carry the physical and mental wounds
Deep into their bones and blood
All the way into their broken souls
They try to keep in tact
Inside their shaking palms,

In an immediate moment of well-meaning,
I tried to write a response piece
To find words to this one-night genocide built on the fury of hate
Just to hate,

I could’ve written about the people,
The customers at work
And the friends of friends on Facebook
Being vicious enough to use this as ammunition for their own views,

Good ol’ boys raising up their hands to the same God that they seek
forgiveness and acceptance from
And then split their tongues open on narcissistic blades
Searing into this pain made like hypocritical love lust
They can’t help but to taste as delicious and say,
“They’re not gonna take my guns,”

Politicians stripping it bare of any emotion
And of the hard effects it’s had on our heart,
Slapping it up on their podiums as this vapid object
That they can insert their opinions in,
Manufactured by what the public wants to hear,
And what they spit out are not genuine apologies,
But this snake-like ticker tape that flicks out from their mouths
While they pander to our vulnerabilities,
Which are still fresh and bleeding on American soil,

All of these different sides
We can all be guilty of,
Letting the flames of fury and deep sadness
Take a slice of red dark over our eyes,
Infusing this very thick,
And very emotional and difficult and troubled wall
Into them,
Slipping into our heads like a madness
That cries alone in the night
Caged and confused in a rusted cell
Where all we can see and hear are
Conservatives are limited in their thinking and empty,
Liberals should tape their mouths shut,
The club scene is dangerous,
Being gay is wrong,
Bible thumpers should learn acceptance and tolerance,
Let’s get rid of all the closed-minded people,
And all of these words and views and hatred and rage and suspicion
Building up this tornado flying around us
With so much debris and objects in the way,
Making it difficult for us to see,

I could’ve written about being an openly gay man
And suddenly having a target
Callously drawn over my skin in crude war paint
Dipped into buckets of fear and misunderstanding
Every time I wanna speak openly
Or hold another man’s hand in public
Or how any action I could take
To embody that part of my life
Being ripped open and sloppily put back together
In the eyes of monsters waiting to see an open meal
Out in the wild
And they wanna be the big man by taking a shot at me,

And how I’ve had to deal with rejection
And my own awkward way of being in this world
To find a place back in comfort with myself and my own skin
And now I’ve gotta a deal with this,
And that I have all these feelings and fears and hopes and desires
That these innocent people were feeling that night
And how it was just another night of being fun,
Wanting,
Chaotic and fragile
And everything that makes the human condition tick
Until these lives
Became hell
And all of these feelings were wasted
Because they don’t live here anymore,

I could’ve written about how it was an insane madman’s dream
And everyone elses nightmare in Aurora
During the Dark Knight Rises screening,
How sad and bleak it was when it happened in a church in Charleston, South Carolina,
And how cruel and one-sided and vicious and cowardly it was in Orlando,
How easy it is for some people to take lives
Because they take it upon themselves
To determine that we shouldn’t live as ourselves,
That our skin color’s wrong,
That we’re just these tiny little toys
In some deeply disturbed individual’s mindset
And how we can get snuffed out in a second
Because we were being just as human as they were,
Except they decided that it was their turn to be God
And play with lives,

I could’ve written about the theory
That this man had replaced true sentiment with bullets,
That he felt claustrophobic because he had to hide among family
Whose views could have remained stubborn in a society where,
As much progress as we have made,
Homosexuality can still be this thing,
This odd, unusual thing that many remain either tight-lipped about,
Sewing up their mouths with a threaded consciousness
That is falsely proclaimed as acceptable in table-manner handbooks
On how to be proper in society,
Or being vocal and malicious and just as evil
As the killers that rampage our society,
How it is 2016,
And we are still talking about gay rights,
Transgender rights,
Gender equality,
And civil rights,
As if the world hasn’t moved forward, at all,

I could’ve written all of this,
But the fact remains
That people are dead,
And that there are still many that live
And have to live with these wounds in their heart
And on their bodies,
Coming back from wars
In battlegrounds that shouldn’t have been the place
To make casualties happen,

But we can still see past the storm,
And yes,
We should speak up and speak out,
Yes,
We should find ways for this to not happen again,
And yes,
We should keep ourselves open
Because in each of these situations,
I’m confident that their could’ve been someone to prevent this from happening,
It can sometimes be easy for us to be complacent
And accept things as they are,

But we should work on accepting who each of us are
And stop seeing what can be so bad in one another
Work openly together to find ways
To stop each other from dying off,
Put together events,
Raise awareness,
Make laws,
Enjoy what time we have in between,
And God-Damn it
Live
For those that can’t,
Be unafraid of these cruel beasts that want us to fear them
Because they don’t have what it takes live this life and survive,

Because life
Is already hard enough.



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