Savage Defectives

A place in the desert,
once known for its heaven,
its perfected Aprils, became a city
of special hell:
not of Hieronymus Bosch, El Topo,
Peckinpah,
or chastened by Mephistopheles,
but where cities go that are too hot to die,
that perpetually reconnoiter eternity
for dollops of feral shade.

There was a national moment of silence
for the newly
fallen, language was
riding shotgun down the
hot, hate speech streets and
sighed:
you can lead
spoken word to metaphor
but you can't make it think.
Glocks cavort across the landscape now
with demystifying candor and extended clips
of the Sonoran chaos ferment in our
common dream.

Out here,
heavy, Moorish misting morning
hangs low over the foothills,
the white cowled peaks,
the winter temperatures adhere
to lows only whispered and beneath
us all,
a solstice underground juggernaut
of soul speaks: our guns

wait for us in heaven to die.

John Macker