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.
