It's my first day on the new job
I used to teach. Today I'm doing class photos.
Little girls, daughters of the parent volunteers, run in circles around my feet.
I'm smiling but it's a facade.

Yesterday, seventeen people needlessly had their lives uprooted and destroyed.
Today people are telling me it's rude to demand gun control and infringe their rights
Fucking rude.
Today people are telling me it's they're classmates faults for not knowing of the coming hell.
There are too many poems about people being shot but we stand here again.
Every year the reaper thanks the NRA for padding their wallet.
The reaper gets paid a commission of death. They care not that some of the victims haven't known love or niceness, haven't gotten to see their graduation day or get their first job.
The politicians got their wages in private jets and personal gifts. They only pay out in meaningless thoughts and prayers while taking payment from the NRA.
We fund death and ignorance instead of saving lives. Every school shooting is our reward for complacency.
How many souls do we owe to the gun manufacturers? How many souls to the right to take lives at eight hundred fifty feet per second? How many souls to this worship of death machines while our future bleeds out in front of it's locker because we can't bring ourselves to confront the cause?

I go to work scared that something will happen and a shooter will show up.
It doesn't matter if their reason is because this school has a high Latino population or because they're just another angry white man.
Because the reaper doesn't care. They get their pay and we get our heartbreak
Either way we just lose and lose and lose
Don't give me this thoughts and prayers bullshit if you aren't willing to help solve it

Image Description: A rocky mountain valley. A railroad crosses a small steel bridge in the bottom left corner. Most of the plants are either evergreens or scrub-type plants. There’s a sliver of a stream or river in the right bottom third. A big rocky mountain comes down to meet a dirt road in the left half of the photo. A blue sky with fluffy clouds takes up the top third.

Panfocal Photography

Scenery

Sunset Marsh