killer -vii

how powerless
modern life has made us
giving us all that we want

we take up guns
and knives and
our personal
weapons of mass
destruction

so we
RAN
to the
NRA

for caliber
for freedom
to bear arms
to feel powerful
in the face of
burglary
assault
accosted
by fear

and what has become
of us?

consumers
victims

hunters
hunted
how

powerless

murder by memory - part iii

The way you remembered it was not the way I remembered it, and everyone else had already forgotten.  The NRA was not a weak lobby in DC. Many financiers and real estate magnates and movie stars and pro athletes and paranoids and phobics wanted to keep a .44 in their glove compartment,  and worked the legal system hard to find the highest caliber argument. But soon there would be no head to put a gun to. Only a heart which held the lantern of truth up to an establishment which held stake in a lesser truth, perhaps an eco-friendly low watt lightbulb. This was no revolution but there were two sides and both believing they were bonafide fighting the forces of darkness. Everyone else was confused as hell or too busy to bother. What were we trying to accomplish? The way you remembered it was not the way I remembered it, and everyone else had already forgotten. But collective forgetfulness tended to take the creases out of faces erasing lines had been drawn, like twilight, like darkness; so long as you could not see them the crashing waves were not so frightful, and might even lull you to sleep.