Facing Her

 I hear you say all you can say

to deflect the incoming

barrage, and

the rifled barrel of your mouth

aims at a none-too-distant

target:

the broad acceptance that this reality

can be borne no more

and we can not stay hostages

to the rifle bore.

So, before you say another word

in defense of this disgrace:

tell me what you would say to 

the girl

without a face. 

Not some trick of rhetoric, the faceless, nameless child,

her features obscured because she never existed--

no, this wild

moment in the life of a man

who felt for a pulse and turned a head

and saw a bloody hole instead--

if you insisted

for once and all the necessity

of this obliterated 

face, as if to ruin the humanity

of her, to erase a whole life?

Then you would deface the world.

Because what sacrifice on your 

idol's altar ever is enough? 

What shed blood, 

or shredded bone? 

You have made a gilded idol

of Cain's brutal, fratricidal

stone.