GUN

Dedicated to the staff of CiCi's Pizza, 3635 Mount Holly-Huntersville Road, Charlotte, NC

“A masked gunman walked into a northwest Mecklenburg restaurant late Saturday, shot and killed an employee and then wounded the manager before leaving with an undisclosed amount of cash. . . Police say violent crime in the Mountain Island Lake area is rare. It was not immediately clear why the shooter targeted the business. He was last seen running from the area, though police say he could have gotten into a nearby vehicle. A detailed description of the shooter was not available Sunday.”

--The Charlotte Observer, March 17th, 2003.

I.

It did not come as the result
of sudden knowledge; neither experience nor information.
It came in a vision, an epiphany, an inspiration.
When I see a gun I see the pain in it.
I no longer see the things I used to see: muzzle velocity, science
and technology, hammer and spring, firing pin
and pressurized gas cartridge.
I see the pain in it.

I see blunt force trauma and penetration trauma; I see
hydrostatic shock. I feel the force of a blow
the shattering of bone and the tearing of viscera.
I did not ask for this vision. When I see a gun I feel an approximation
of physical pain that I know, somewhere in the depths of my psyche,
is a warning.

II.

I have been as anonymous to you as you have been to me.
I know your names; that information was in the report.
I cannot say I could pick you out of my memory and place you
behind the counter. I can somehow
imagine a turning away, a twist of the torso,
a raising of hands. I can almost hear an explosion. For some reason
my mind insists on a puff
of smoke.
I cannot pick out which of you is missing in the echoed call WELCOME TO CICI'S.
But the clearest thing is the pain I carry in my sense memory.
The clearest thing and the truest.

III.

It is this thing our society struggles to eliminate.
We do this by making the thing iconic. The icon cannot contain pain.
It is flat and it is static and it is at a remove. By making an icon of it
GUN, PARTNER!
by transforming the weapon into a representation
we suck the pain out of it, we drain the thing of emotions
and therefore of danger. We can therefore say GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE
BULLETS DO and complain that jack-booted government thugs
are coming to steal our pain and our death, to pry our destruction
from out of our cold, dead hands.

Call it the stolen thunder; call it the God transformed into swan
for the civilisation-founding rape, center stage, next show at ten.
Call it the murderous law
of unintended consequences.
Call it collective amnesia.
Call it stupidity and to hell with it.

IV.

Write what you know, the man said;
Write what you know.

Not of special knowledge.
Out of a vision, an epiphany
a revelation, all of those religious words
that are supposed to mean you're talking for God.
I see the pain in it.
The machinery of evil is always a little simpler that it appears.
When I see a gun I see the pain in it.
Blunt force trauma and hydrostatic shock.
A bullet is a foreign object. It doesn't belong
in my body, or in your body,
or in this steel-framed-fake-stucco palace
full of cheap pizza and piped in pop music
and the squeals of kids on soccer teams and at birthday parties
and when the last of the squeals
have been squeezed out of this place
it should be quiet, and steamy, and open
to the sweet night air.

Notes on the writing of "Gun"

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