I catch you on the news, barricaded behind screaming young hostages and piled blue sewer pipe. Along the sleeve of your army surplus jacket, where you hold a chinese boy pinned between rifle and forearm, small paint chips catch on the ratty multi-fibrous cotton/steel weave of your flak jacket. The back of a little white girl's neck has been duct taped to the muzzle of a para-military issue high-velocity nightmare. From their vantage points, S.W.A.T. assesses you as a critical threat/breakpoint mentality. They watch you pass out blacked-out hoods to the children. Street-level emergency units can hear you tell the children to stop crying. On another cable channel, your suicide note is being read over the air and dismantled by on-air callers. Your bouts with alcoholism and loss of God in your life. The lack of cheap, safe housing for your elderly mother. Awkward, irrational phrases of your brain and your walls and the rooms of your mind collapsing in on themselves. God's children becoming your children. There is a nationwide media blackout of the last ten seconds of your life and the lives of seven children. Emergency units are given the green light to fire chaos and final solutions towards your body. I sit at my kitchen table as my television displays a warning of 'experiencing technical difficulty, please stand by'.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.