A Modest Proposal

The skeleton of a child is rarely exhibited
in a teaching institution or elsewhere.
You must be at least drinking or voting age
to enter a biology or art classroom dead.

Perhaps we are approaching this wrong.
What if the skeletons of the October 7th dead
stood on the streets of Gaza City, for all to see?
And then if the tens of thousands of murdered kids,

and their moms and dads, were placed as if out for a stroll
on the streets of Jerusalem? Here’s Mom with her six kids
in a park where Israeli children will play. Here’s a sweet
young bone-man out walking his dog, holding a stick to toss.

Let Ukrainian families of skeletons stroll the streets of Moscow
and greet the living as they run past with hot dogs and vodka.
Hell, bring the Russian boys (and many were boys) back home.
Do you have any idea how much space 300,000 skeletons would occupy?

Place the Russian skeleton soldiers in the subway and clubs,
Let them hear “Murder on the Dance Floor” play again as smokin’ dyevooshkee
whirl about their brightly polished bones. Put boys on Putin’s front lawns.
There should be lots of room. He owns more palaces than the czars.

I think we’d see an overnight sea change of opinion in these countries,
should they have to share their urban thoroughfares with these sacrifices
to nothing but the hell of egos & the egos of so many worthless -isms.
Fill the streets with living bones, gorgeous bones, the divine architecture

of our desires which can endlessly pose! Have them posed in all the acts
of living and loving, have lovers reclining to watch a sunset, finger bones clasped in a restful forever. Don’t flash deaths at us as numbers on screens,
delivered by uncaring voices of desiccated souls who profit from this.

Fill our countries with their deaths. Own them. Release the young
from their graves and let them stand among us! We have no bravery.
The worst lie is burying everything. That’s how we got here anyway.
Let the dead have their say, their day. Stop talking about ideas! People!

People are the thing! Don’t look at the liars on your cell phone screen.
Look at the small skeleton of a little girl atop that hill this evening.
Someone has given her a red balloon to hold. See how her silhouette
communicates its simple joy. Will she keep it, or let it go?