Shooting: A Collage

Infection.
We pretend to not know it
until it is inevitable.
It festers and bleeds and saps
blood mushrooms
in the full moon.
Pretending.
Abstract realization.
Bucolic escape and vulgarity lists.
Natural things that can be expressed.
Waterfalls
waterfalls
waterfalls.
Seventy percent of all of us
will eventually fall.
The other twenty will dealt with how we wish.
Most people bury it

I have the ability to notice things.
It benefits me only, as far as I can tell,
but sometimes it keeps me alive.
Symmetry, asymmetry, color, light, line
tone, gradient, repetition, pattern
criticism and theory.
Visions.

Music.
Music. Music. Music.
A great word packaging an unfinished well of expression.
Music is pepper.
Music is ink.
Music is un-corrupted diamonds in the human mind,
when it is at its best.
Rare and often eventually compromised.
My Favorite Things by The John Coltrane Quartet. John Coltrane and Elvin Jones emphasize the beat with a sustained note and cymbal ride when the listener is singing along, in their head or out loud, the word "things" in the titular moment of the chorus of My Favorite Things. I feel that moment everytime I hear it.

Reality:
Another school shooting.
It is cold now, but will once again be warm.
Awful things happen on a daily basis.
Globalization and advertising
make it simple, almost self evident
to forget about tragedy almost immediately.
Warfare footage. Climate change.
Technological mediocrity.
Forced blandness.
An isolated tumor
of fear and consumption.

Second life.

Talented dancers, talented composers, talented musicians.
Wonderful and beautiful bands and orators.
Characters
with great facial expressions
with flexible dance moves
with tone
with color
with contrast
with words which cannot simply be read.
Another school shooting and it was here
at Purdue University.
Once again, I am glad to not be Mitch Daniels,
but this is not about him.
It scares me that I can only express this in abstract fragments.

return to haiku
return to haiku, you fool
she is beautiful

Another school shooting
and it was here at Purdue

School shooting: Purdue University
Little Known of the Casualties

Shots Fired Near the Engineering Mall

"I heard there were three gunman."

CNN reports of a school shooting in the Midwest before local news source has arrived on the scene. An old woman at a bar looks up at the television screen with a cigarette in her hand and mentions that the local news did not get there before the national news with slight tone of disgust in her voice.

Tweets. A bird chirp of information that says warning and not very much more. One hundred and forty characters, some of it hypertext, which many must not understand. I, myself, have a hard time caring about using it, even though it is right there at fingertips everytime I type this thing up.

-Three shooters what?-
-Six have been shot. Are you kidding me?-
-Three confirmed dead? No way, dude.-
-Four dead in Ohio was about the US government opening fire on students. This isn't the government. Neal Young rules, though.-

    For awhile, I didn't know what to believe and I was perfectly safe from any harm; A very strange sensation. I was paying attention to the information fed to me because people I know and love could be endanger. My mom works at Purdue and two friends were attending classes near the building where this isolated tragedy occurred. Also a girl I am in love with was working in the area. Almost everyone I see and know on a regular basis live and work within a short radius of this well documented city and university in the state of Indiana. This was surreal to me, but my reality is completely surreal to a life of regular and random violence. This was and is methodical violence. This is intentional violence. This is theatrical violence with the exception that it is real violence.
Shooting at Purdue.
One dead.
Shooter in custody.
Photographer from the Exponent newspaper mistakenly taken into custody.
The victim was a teachers assistant.
A resident assistant named Jay Severson was shot and killed at Purdue in 1996. The shooter killed himself before the police could take him into custody.
They took the shooter into custody this time around and he will have to explain himself. If he cannot it becomes his problem and what a problem it is. The human condition. The unchecked and unexplained violence of what the human mind can manifest.
Edit: He killed himself while awaiting trial.

    Elated by the fact that no one I know was hurt in the wave of paranoid panic, I walked to the University book store with the intention of buying some new pens. Pens are one of the few things I am stubborn and particular about. Plus, I needed to take a walk after my totally natural, but still utterly irrational panic attack.
    After I purchased my three pens with gradually increasing widths of tips, I walked out of the book store just in time to hear the words "I'm alive!" being yelled across the street. "I'm alive!" the young man yelled again, raising his arms in the air as he spun around on the icy corner of Pierce and State street. He had heather grey Purdue sweat pants and a sweatshirt bunched around his knees and elbows and cropped hair that was slowly grown out; jar head hair. Bright white sneakers in such deep snow. "I'm alive!" he yelled again as he and his friends left Harry's Chocolate Shop with backpacks on their shoulders. They crossed caddy-corner through the intersection. "I'm alive!" he yelled again with a smug smirk on his face. "I'm alive!" once more.
    "Well someone is not, if you haven't heard." I yelled back at him, irritated.
    He looked over at me with angry gaze. "Alright, cool it, man." His friend said and they continued walking in the opposite direction as me.
   The departed's name is Andrew Boldt, and I didn't know anything about him.
   This is a tragedy.

Aaron C. Molden