Unending minutes

Answers are perpetually being formed

Through many unanswerable questions 

For example

Hope is often misunderstood

As the nourishment to loneliness

Misfortune is justified 

By blaming forces uncontrolled 

Ordinariness is a biased view

That assumes human importance

 

The bullet shells that stay fallen

As the killer runs his course through

A head fell tick took

Tock tock Then face smashed

Then hands disfigured tick tock

Tick tock Then feet no longer stepped

Then a chest silenced tick tock

Tick tock Then fingers broken

Then arms flailing tick tock

Tick tock Then back crumbling 

Then stomach spilled tick tock

Tick tock Then eyes darting

Then womb disintegrating tick tock

Tick tock Then heart becoming idle

Then nose crushed tick tock

 

Tick tock Then the bullets are counted

One lays open mouthed

Next to the fallen toddler child

The second twists itself

Into a sign of regret for the dead father

The third bows its emptiness

Wiping the tears of a living mother

The fourth is exasperated

At the sight of a bloodied skull cap

The fifth mourns the relationship

As it sits itself near the mourning bride

The sixth is embedded into the ceiling

Solitary as it views the gathering grief

The seventh is fallen into the bird bath

Wondering if there ever will be birds again

The eighth has entered the sanctum sanctorum

And hurts itself as footsteps pause in prayer

The ninth actually is in despair, it tangibly

feels the furiously beating heart, desperate to live

The tenth is crushed into a metal ball

rolling, rolling into its own guilt

The eleventh tries to rearrange its fragments

As they stay stuck on the young man’s face

The twelfth has landed wobbling slowly

Into the wobbly legs of an elder at prayer

The thirteenth she’ll realizes devotion was

the fourteenth, fifteenth, another, another, another

 

All around in broken bodies, dead places

Grieving mothers, shocked children and

A distraught community clinging to

unanswered questions, and fears

 

Fear of

Enclosures

Possibilities

Gatherings

Until they need not have any more fear

and seconds, minutes, hours, days, years

stay stilled within that one moment

Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock

 

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NaPoWriMo 2019

unfolding over time