Maybe we never mourned sufficiently, we never
cried enough, we should have refused ourselves
food and water, we should have stopped seeking
a promotion, we should have let the infrastructure
crumble, we should have crawled
on all fours for decades,

but we

got up at 6 am, dutiful as ever, and caught the trains,

tightly packed, complaints fell
on deaf ears, we were speeding,
merciless, unable
to jump, to love, so we

repeat, rinse, repeat,

arrived at the predestination,
to kill or be killed, so we
killed them all, we
shot the toddler crawling
towards his dead mother, bashed
the skull of the doe-eyed girl, made
them all a pale corpse,

after all, after this, of course, every

sweetness of earth
was clouded
by those girl’s eyes, and we
couldn’t love our own
child crawling, and wore shades
to avoid the autumn brilliance, and earplugs
to drown the spring birdsong, and ignored
the ceremony of the dawn sun rising, no day

now was new but we rode
the trains even after we
already killed ourselves,

and now we who would rinse and repeat, corpses themselves,
perhaps, we must mourn now as if morning itself
depended on it, mourn

the birdsong, the patient trees, who
give us this daily breath, mourn
the child’s laughter, still somehow
innocent, mourn

now, or forever