Legacies
Two hundred and twenty nine.
That’s how many legacies I’ve left at every school.
Red Lake.
Virginia Tech.
Columbine.
Santa Fe High School.
Sandy Hooks.
West Nickel Mines Amish School.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Robb Elementary.
I didn’t want to be remembered as a graduation rate.
I wanted to be exonerated for the rate I rang shots like school bells.
At least the one thing I got from school,
is that mass is the thing that holds matter.
Maybe that’s why so many mass shootings
happen where the people that matter the most are.
Bullets from semi-automatics sitting present in class,
depending on cops to show up on time to save the day yet
there’s always an excuse for why they’ve been tardy.
They rather let these bullets be the reason your kids are absent
than to be present to take me out of attendance.
Clipped the wings of my 4th period classmate in Biology
as the bullets dissected his body.
I watched his body turn cold as others froze
thinking whether they should fight or take flight.
I don’t know what intrigued me most.
Seeing bullet-riddled students fight to breathe for life
or
watching cops wait until the room goes silent to let their instincts fly.
I pledged allegiance to manifestos that manifested as my predecessors.
Jeffrey
Seung-Hui
Dylan.
Eric.
Dimitrios
Charles.
Nikolas
Salvador
They were the pipelines this system pushed me through!
As a 16 year old, I wrote Christmas letters to Uncle Sam
to ask for hollow tips
so when the day came to leave bodies hollow,
tips to hotlines wouldn’t be enough to save them.
Kids looked forward to being 18 as a milestone
while I looked forward to creating 18 headstones along the mile!
If my classmates were 21, they would have been taking shots at the club!
Instead, they took 21 shots to their corpses!
Now my name is synonymous with God!
They say my name in vain because I’m the reason
there isn’t life left in their children’s veins!
It’s even insane for the media to think
I went insane.
A kid bullied into depression and anger.
Young buck with a few loose screws.
Like it only took a thread to snap in me
instead of realizing I’ve been knitting my safety blanket
from the same thread since 1999.
The media traded my hatred for your sympathy.
NRA traded your kids for cash outs.
Politicians traded my violence for your votes.
Pulled into a cycle of reincarnation that will only
manifest more manifestos who look at what I’ve done
as nothing more than a high score to beat in a shooting game.
My mental is not unstable.
It’s uncontrollable.
It’s easy to ignore.
Like the last 40 gunshots you blurred
while reading this poem.
