When reporters go asking the obligatory neighbors about the latest guy
who got himself a rifle and a wrong idea and went off,
weighted down, to a crowded restaurant or forsaken clock tower
or a downtown office building where he rode from floor to floor,
firing and firing and firing until no one was left to unload on,
and he turned the gun on himself at last — sadly, always last
in the immutable order of such events — just this once
I'd really like to hear even one of those incredulous neighbors say
You know, I always thought he was way out there,
somewhere the buses don't ever run. But it's no surprise
this almost never makes its way into the comfort of our living rooms.

I'd settle for the smallest bit of self-satisfaction, some have you seen
the car he drives? But what never fails is another tired reprise
of that quiet-man-who-kept-to-himself routine. Because that's how
they usually think of themselves, and now it seems this is undeniably
their story, too — no matter the extremes that someone's gone to,
getting it told again.
                             What they're being asked, of course, is the usual
did-they-see-this-coming, could-something-have-been-done?
As if of course they should have known, but instead they've been caught
napping, roused unceremoniously out of their no-idea sleep.
At least a hundred times we've seen the rumpled man in the ball cap
who can't stop shaking his head. The woman standing under her porchlight,
holding a crying baby girl in her pale arms.
                                                             This isn't to make light
of whatever carnage this time darkens another day. This assuredly is not
to pardon or apologize, diminish or justify. It simply happens
there's no shortage of reasons why some people are bound to snap
like rubber bands stretched thin around stacks of overdue bills
or wear out like fan belts in the grueling summer heat. Let's say
it's a tumor, a bad haircut, a surprise layoff at Chrysler.
Or a lover walking away at high noon, refusing even to turn around
and draw the shaky gun with the Goodbye flag stuck in its mouth,
and bang, the sudden opening in the heart is no one's idea
of anything funny. With no light in the window come evening,
what's left, I'm sorry to say, is the dark that everyone's afraid of.
And whether the heart, after all its incessant and solitary burning,
eventually goes out like an exhausted light bulb in its socket
or like a furloughed sailor in his raucous cartoon night on the town,
there's sure to be some real bleeding through the walls before it's over.

Any one of us could wak up sobered by the fragile promise of another day
breaking outside the window — a punishment more cruel, I'm afraid,
than unusual. The sun already done with us,
rising like a hanging judge in a hurry for his lunch,
although he wouldn't have missed the stunned looks on our faces
for the world. And we have to take it on the lam, slipping out the door
before it slams shut, again, with us inside. Our only way out of this
may be to get into the goddamn car and drive, and the hell with everything
the neighbors will think to say later, until we're somewhere else
completely. How we wound up there, running on fumes — and whatever
we might have passed along the way — is, to our relief, more or less
an inscrutable blur of no one's business and anybody's guess.

And now that these neighbors havae learned how one of their own
has come to no good end again, maybe they'll know better
what signs to look for, who'll be the next to spin out, taking off
into a day so long he won't be making it back home the same person,
ever. One by one it happens, and always in this order: at first
it's only Mr. What's-His-Name, gone haywire. But pretty soon
there goes the neighborhood.
                                            Surely they must have had their suspicions:
pot-luck supper no-show, carpool holdout, and always that light
burning in his late-night room at the top of the house.
But they lived so close to him, sometimes that's hard to say.
They're still trying to articulate their dismay for the record — anything
they still can't believe, over and over. Until what happened out there
on this cumbersome day in the world is almost beyond them. And with luck,
by tomorrow they're nowhere to be found, for days or weeks or even years —
although I'm betting that's too gracious a reprieve for me to hope for.

In some other neighborhood, miles or years away from here,
there might be a young girl who can't remember much about herself
as a baby in her mother's arms, except that somehow she lived through it —
even those long nights no one could stop her crying once it started,
and for no good reason they could think of. She was once that inconsolably
alive. And when at last it's her turn to be asked what did she ever
really know about whoever's gone wrong and done it this time,
she'll grow quieter than she's ever been in her life, keeping to herself
this uneasy sense of exhilaration — the way her heart is even now
engaged, an unpredictable engine she can't help gunning. She has no idea
how far it will take her, but in her most invigorating dream
it's the dead of night, a straight shot out of town, and she can't wait
to see what it can do when she puts her foot to the ridiculously bloody floor.