Young men lost and never found

Round and round the baton is passed

Down the fatherless generations

Killing with knives, suicide:

Forsaken boys in care homes which kill

The dreams in the hearts of the young, 

Society twists the knife

Makes them speak in tongues.

Crimes against the person

Those fading penumbras of law and order

Who will search for the heart of the matter?  

Our children are playing at games on the green,

Where first shall be last, and the last will scream 

For understanding, let him that is without sin

Cast the first stone 

Murder in the presence of the frail holy ghost

This tempest of terror, meaningless murder,

Should shake us all out of any residual sense of superiority,

The sons and daughters of all of us are at risk

Of ending in a ditch

Shadows scatter

Where the killing is done.

Hearts are thrown at strangers

Aren't they? 

Pain, splattered on a canvas,

Scrawled on a wall,.

Art

Is only a husk of form,

Without the artless agony

Of daily life:

The strangled scream

And the carving knife.