Breadcrumb #244

JESI TAYLOR

In point blank range
the dead, cold core of the star
bled blue and black and silent
while the badge drowned in power
and the shots fired in waves

He couldn’t breathe
but his flesh signed a contract with the grave
years before they transformed his neck
into a portal,
and they watched his life dissipate
and contort into a symbol of
antimatter, dark matter garnered
and choked by the hands of the state

of chaos, of circumstance,
of the romance language of violence
whispered in endless black swan songs.

In point blank range
sidewalks become final resting grounds
where two cents become last words
and lovers becomes statistics
because happiness and liberty mean nothing
when the pursuit of life is contingent.

When your body exists to be counted
and your pulse creeps like a metronome,
and your heart beat is a pendulum pitted
against the syncopated circadian rhythm of
equity comatose.

The fine line between life and death can be blue
and thin and the site of the right kind of fear,
the kind of fear that turns little boys into target practice,
the kind of fear reserved for the white knights
lit by the swirling reds and blues of sirens.

In point blank range
they hunt.
The shots fired in waves compose
the political hydrosphere of bodies
drowned in chaos, in circumstance,
a final solution
that gives the problem the power
and calls it justice.

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