THE MAHATMA'S SANDALS

Amuck with off-pitch
dreamers sealing nightmares
in Rubbermaid totes stacked
in fibrous pink attics, flying
prescription highs, fatting
hero calls like factory swine
so they won't beckon again.

(Before, in a time of swaying
oak and doorbell charm, we were
not so afraid, were clean
gigabytes of space, did not
buy shrink-wrapped promise
to drape over hours
aglow with summer dirt.)

But news keeps breaking
at finish lines, in hoodies
and 1st grade classrooms,
at the mall and northbound
on the thruway. Heartache
triaged by font size, length
of unbroken coverage,

eyewitness video, proximity
and body count mathematics.
At each airport, our President touches
down, unbuckles a eulogy. Why vigil
here? For which rupture
did our flag descend? I want to know.
I want to not know.

As a boy, my downy pre-sleep
convulsed with horror: into the gap
between ego and mystery flashed
skull-cracking rocks, flesh-shredding
blades, lungs popping under the sea.
Now, everything to lose, bullets
pock my falling sons, love

drains from my wife's balding
scalp, my spine folds at the grill
crush, accordion of loss. Preemptive
suffering-my oldest practice.
And every morning I am light,
having burrowed a way through
grief. But there are bombings,

campus sprees and so much ignored:
girls buried alive in an earth whose mothers
say raising a daughter is like watering
a neighbor's tree, where packs of boys
strut drunk on beer and invincibility,
where 300 million guns sleep like stars-
by the time one shoots,

something's already dead.
Call me Pollyanna-
there simply are no slots left
to wedge another fear. You can keep
your realism, too; it told me to wait
for my father to die and ran
off with my childhood.