Oftentimes

the young dash knives at the young and you don’t
hear a siren for hours. I see your home-grown radicals
and raise you our mutual shambles, the stale houses
you’d run from, the fat glee of an angry man; our reaped
youth. You are already afraid; yours is a spoof fear,
budget of gore. You quack your fright like an audience.
Here we come, with our in-house frighteners, ingots
and bling; our false-modest mudbloody women, wailing,
our girls whoring their heather. These headstones argue
permanence, sleek grails where your dead gutter
like scented candles. I’ve seen row upon row of propped
crosses, flimsy as false nails, leaning, yearning, the dirt
air groped. Your heroism is stunt; can’t picture a remedial
blonde in a green ski-mask, fifteen and cropped, croppy,
brunt and gone. Well, did you ever? Those earnest shires
are home, not this, the trudged and commonplace country.
These hills are ours for the vanishing: hills, bones, their stowed
booty. You are afraid, but you don’t know how the young dash
knives at the young, prowl for a piercing, night after night.
That’s what they are. Do I have to teach you your children?
You are aghast at the mauled hearth, empty bed, but look:
here is a boy, decked out in his do nothing deadness.
His brother washed his hatchling face, too big for his body.
Packed like a wineglass in wads of cotton. Couldn’t he be
just any mother’s son?