The Horror

Jan 7, 2026

My brother used to say the Tibetan Buddhists
with their wild cosmology understood horror,
how it blooms beside that proliferating light –
expansion, contraction: the shuddering cosmos.
Renée Nicole Good, gunned down
on Portland Ave in Minneapolis, MN.
I watch the video until my eyes hurt.
I’m not sure what I’m looking for.
Trying to convince myself it’s real?
Sweep murder into a capsule I can swallow?

When Kurtz screamed, The horror!,
he voiced the nightmare in the human mind.
Psyche houses demons you can’t evict.
My brother knew what it was like to dwell
with hell-realm beings. They exhaled in his ear,
danced at the foot of his bed, flashing in the
mirror while he rehearsed his make-believe summations.

Buddha taught: suffering, impermanence,
non-self are the facts of existence, we live
in an imperfect, ever-changing, impersonal space.
That creates distance, if you want it.
You’re the bird soaring in clouds, looking down
on a savage, shimmering stage, but:
Renée Nicole Good’s children’s feet are buried in that ice & tar,
planted in a puddle of their mother’s blood.
No one has wings broad enough to lift them
beyond such a beginning. If they bloom, they bloom amidst violence.

History says, want is the devil,
& every addict can testify that craving
is never sated by consuming the object of desire.
I scrawled in a diary once, the purpose of want
is to fuel want. Soon enough, you’re shrieking,
I run the world! You’re a walking hell,
like Milton’s Lucifer, wearing hate like a vest.
You slaughter a woman on a frozen street,
leaving her sons & daughter flightless, leaving her
last poems undrafted. & then? You tell yourself
that’s simply the cost of keeping heaven intact?

***

(Featured image from Flickr user Chad Davis; used under CC BY 4.0)