Where Childhood Ends

The first word that enters my head is Complicity
Pulling a lazy duvet over my daughter’s restless legs,
Positioning a laptop to watch the Simpsons on Hulu,
The default BBC website interrupts our yellow plans with screams of murder from Connect-it-cut.
‘Why did he shoot such young children, daddy?
They didn’t know’.
Why don’t my Internet filters work on reality?
Why does life always deal a hand that’s a million times worse than what we could ever imagine
we would need protect our children from?
If we can protect them.
If only we could protect them.

The guns are easy.
We built them so we could sell them.
We stole ancient lies from stone-eyed tablets to justify the money we made.
We held them high over the poor losers heads itching to bring them down hard and shouted

‘See! I have the right! I hold the right!
I am the right!”
‘You are the weak and you are the wrong’.

We never counted on our son’s black dog with the white face.
We never thought that if we fed him just a little that he would follow our son home.
And curl up to sleep at the foot of his bed;
licking his face at night while he dreamt of missing school.
Licking the salt, licking the sanity from his face,
until there was none left.

We never thought that if we trained him,
if we taught him how to shoot,
how to focus on positive aims,
how to meet his targets successfully that eventually,
inevitably, sadly and eventually and inevitably,
he would mislay his targets and bring the bullets home.
While his black dog with the white face reared up on his haunches and smiled.

Who drove the car, the dog or the boy?
It doesn’t matter, we are on a final mission;
We are your children and we are ready for the evening news.