43 Violence poems

This is you—Titanus giganteus, your maw snapping pencils in half and cutting through human flesh. My encyclopedia chokes on your bulk. My camera, timid, afraid to look, as if you’re naked—not one adult male, but millions. Few garments sound as fine as flak jacket, the best of the tagmata the thorax, more prime than brains as the body can keep mating, cracking its margins. Your shield like a wing, protects your bulletproof heart from the wind, your right arm black in the cloth of your brothers. Full face visor. Baby gladiator. Beyond the screen, memorized—jawbone like a scandal reflecting all the thieves and beggars. Insect lord, insect mind. This is my fear. You look like my brother, my son. You could kill me with your looks.

Red ambulance flicker, curbstone, wheels, a gurney. Down the breezeway a baby, crying out among the gawk-mouthed heads. Knifed, sliced, the man bleeding through the gauze and onto his belly. It reminds me of the night when my mother and I slept in our LTD while the cops surrounded our apartment complex. I remember someone standing near the yellow tape saying 2A had robbed the market across the street, that the manager was shot twice— once in the arm, once in the shoulder—and that the gunmen were held up in their apartment, squealing threats from their window. When I think of it now, the danger, the eventual gunshots echoing off gray brick, I remember the panicked yells of inquiry, a girl crying her daddy was shot. But the knifed man, now under gauze and tubing, hadn’t robbed a store, and the baby, now on its mother’s hip, was quiet and drooling. When the cops searched 2A, they found money stuffed in the couches, in posts and pans, in the pages of storybooks, and as each officer, one by one, emerged from the apartment holding pistols and rifles, my mother told me to go back to sleep. I don’t remember her carrying me to my bed, only waking the next day when the girl who cried daddy, knocked at our door, asked if I could come out and play. Now when I look at her, that same girl, with a busted eye and lip, I wonder: if when she stabbed was she stabbing the boyfriend who beat her for burning supper or was it her dad for wrenching his arm around her neck, prodding a pistol at her head on that balmy night of echo and threat. For a second I think of asking her, “Whatever happened to your dad? Is he still in jail?” But I realize it may not even be the same girl, though I want it to be. For some reason I think if she kills that man, if he bleeds to death before the ambulance can make it to the hospital, somehow the brief triumph of metal over flesh would rid my memory of the deafening crack of gunpowder, and its long shout in the night.

—in memory ofCynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance,Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor,Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney,Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr.,Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Myra ThompsonShot and killed while at church.Charleston, SC (6-18-2015), RIP poem by        poem we can end the violence every day                        after every other day 9 killed in Charleston, South Carolina they are not 9 they are each one alive we do not know you have a poem to offer it is made of action—you must search for it     run outside and give your life to it when you find it    walk it back—blow upon it carry it taller than the city where you live when the blood comes down do not ask          if it is your blood   it is made of 9             drops honor them wash them stop them from falling

The cheap dropped ceiling jumped like a pot-lid boiling when our upstairs neighbor chased his girl that winter. Falling out of summer’s skimpy tops she’d want our phone. Her plush lips creased. Not exactly blonde, but luteous , we thought, pleased the right word was there for that shade of slightly slutty mermaid. Wincing, we’d hear him punch along the floor on crutch- es, a giant bat trying to mince a mayfly. Sex and Violence you called them; Blondie with Dagwood on crystal meth, I’d tell our friends over dinners stewed in noise. Even his truck cowed. Black, smoked glass, outsized wheels flaunted like chrome knuckles we shrank from, ducked, afraid we’d find her later, knocking at our door. Some nights we waited through like captured prey. To you I’d turn in bed, saying the furtive words against your back, I love ... You’d stroke my hair, or hip, all our years the same flip crack, I do , too .

You want more? You want some more of this shit? so he puts his weight to his elbow jammed under the jaw of the other one pinned there, panicked, panting, his back to the bricks. The others are loud and jeering and stand in a jackal circle a spitting-length away. The cold air is full of bird song. The sex—sheer sugar—of the flowering trees turns to powder against the skin, and cakes the sidewalks pale green, and packs the curbs. Far away a powerful siren cries. Someone is about to get his ass kicked. But now the cruel gang spots someone—okay, it’s me—who is writing this whole scene down. It’s so easy to surpass the limits of the powers of description.What are you looking at?

The streets of San Francisco are littered with bodies of bank robbers & mobsters prostitutes & pimps Bullet holes in foreheads Clothes covered with that fake orange blood they used in the seventies Just pretend dead No sirens (those will be dubbed in later) Camera pans an immaculate city Mid-morning weekday only a few tourists about (everyone else is at work) Light traffic on bridges Newly erected Pyramid dominates the scene Sky Maya blue perpetually wiped clean by low-flying clouds Come nightfall even the junkies in the Haight & strippers in North Beach will have a kind of innocence Just extras on the set As close to Utopia as you could get in 1973 & now only attainable in a Dirty Harry movie

There is a hole. In the hole is everything people will do to each other. The hole goes down and down. It has many rooms like graves and like graves they are all connected. Roots hang from the dirt in craggy chandeliers. It's not clear where the hole stops beginning and where it starts to end. It's warm and dark down there. The passages multiply. There are ballrooms. There are dead ends. The air smells of iron and crushed flowers. People will do anything. They will cut the hands off children. Children will do anything— In the hole is everything.

In this world hacked from marrowed dust, the half-breed assassin slays men before they breed to corps, He belts his innard song. He travels to a sapling town where sawyers hew logs to songs of plovers, and mansadors tame broncs of the blackest, lustiest blood. Soon the town blooms to terror, and fades before it booms. Ghosts weed out of bodies with their sharp imagined hands. A hobbled miner, delirious from the sun, feels the shadow of his innard song, and croaks: I’m a buck nun failure anyway. The half-breed leaves him be, rides to a town of tents wooled with alfalfa and glass-needled rain shatters the dusted tundra.

“Violence is as American as cherry pie.” —H. Rap Brown, former Black Panther justice minister Thanks for the violence. Thanks for Walt’s rude muscle pushing through the grass, for tiny Gulliver crushed between the giant’s breasts. Thanks for Moby’s triangular hump and Ahab’s castrated leg. Thanks for the harpoons. Thanks for this PBS history of the automatic pistol. The good machine is simple, few moving parts, an efficiency of what’s preserved and what is wasted, so with each shot the recoil cocks the gun to shoot again, then recoil, cock and shoot again, recoil, cock, and so on till the target buys it, or your ammo’s spent. Thanks for the poem, which is really a little pistol: load and cock, point and aim, then the trigger, the hammer, the powder, the discharge, the bullet, the target, the recoil, the crime. No smoking gun, just ballistics, caliber, powder marks, the question why. My life is like a loaded gun, and when I aim it at you I hope to take off the top of your head, no safety on, no playing nice, just the spark, the flash, the damage, just red American cherry pie violence. So, thank you for the harpoon gun we aim at God and death and all the unknown world, and for the spear-stuck beast, rope ripping through torn hands, for what refuses to be caught and what we fathom only by riding the whale down into the deep, refusing to let go.

The body that used to contain your daughter we found it behind the fence It was in a red coat It was collected Is she saved Is she in the system You’re lucky we have other bodies to put your daughter in Come on down to the station