Vine
       

I must have watched it twenty times
Before they took it down.
The one in the park on a bench
Where the kid in a blue hoodie
Shoots himself in the chest with a gun
He's showing off to his unseen friend
Who is giggling then gasps and a shriek
Starts up in her throat but stops.
The tock! and the little hole flapping open
In his shirt where the blood will leak out
In tendrils that climb down
The twin posts of his pants—
But not yet. Not yet.

I must have watched it twenty times, studying
The shadows, the shape of a cloud, trying to
Imagine my way into those six seconds thrown
Up on the Internet that morning
Before finally giving up and returning to my book.
One of the Penguins from the seventies
With a short piece from a dour Swedish poet
That had the word abeyance in it and black trees;
At the end, a long prison wall receding
Into the vanishing point, and if I'm not mistaken
The strangled cry of a bird
A passerby hears and moves on.

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Copyright © 2018 Daniel Lawless All rights reserved
from The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With
Salmon Poetry
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission