Aaron Bushnell
Aaron Bushnell One day you looked down and saw blood On the hands blithely clattering away at the keys. They were your hands. The blood was the blood of children. You went to the bathroom and waved them Under the motion-controlled faucet, The motion-controlled soap dispenser, The motion-controlled dryer, Touching nothing but the door, But when you sat back down at your desk Here's the smell of the blood still. The only solution: to burn the flesh away. Christ went down to hell to harrow hell. You brought hell up to earth. To mark the site, you raised a flag Of fire, then lowered it to half-mast, Where it fluttered out from the staff of your spine, Buffeted by the wind the heat made. You stood calmly, as if you were in a gazebo Instead of in a whirling funnel of fire, And even when you began to scream It was still somehow so mundane, A man standing in the street burning. At the windows of the embassy, Low-level staffers watched. Cue the internet. Reddit threads. Popcorn gif. Anonymous comments. He could’ve just gone on Tinder. But it was not the internet yet. It was not a clip or a vid or a reel, this. This is really happening, happening. Did you think that if you burned yourself away You could burn away our complicity? When I look around all I see is complicity. Just now I noticed Blood on the hands typing this. What's done cannot be undone. God, God forgive us all.