Chicago, USA

Warm winds whip a city by the lakeside free
of wintery pretension, icebergs rebecoming
reflective shields on asphalt. Meanwhile an army
open fires on a crowd in a mountain city, far from here,
gray and brown as this one, six thousand miles away.
A boys head bashed in by the butt of a gun.
The most violent way to use an AK-47 is to smash
skulls with it, not firing it at all. In every video
there are others taking videos and however improbable
it is these videos have filtered to Chicago
where I watch the boy in red die a dozen times.
In one framee his mouth is open, screaming something
inaudibly, fingers outstretched like stars, torso slumped
against a cement blockade, the empty street. He wildly
runs his hands back through his hair. The next frame
his hair is stickied, thick with blood that looks like syrup.
It strikes me most the way his arms jostle with mock-life
men carry him while running, impromptu litter bearers
grabbing limbs. Suddenly the all of it seems of relative
and relatively little weight and I feel weightless,
hanging in the bloodied streets of a city far from here.