Aux armes, etc.

Above, the stars reach out their arms –
I see guns in the sky, headlights of a car
driven through the rain – a rocket,
falling, red, arcing like a mouth through
the sky – which is now turning purple,
Batman-movie purple, and an anarchist boy
with his black hood up and black bandana over
his mouth leaps now, over the barricades, removes
one, I recognize him from his eyes, the only
part of him that is visible, the eyes I knew
when he slept out on the roof after a party
when none of us felt like cleaning – and he
is motioning now, for us to come through,
and we do, and the face of Trayvon Martin
comes too, it is printed in color on signs
and the text below his smile says
protect our children, and with that, already,
he has ceased to be a real boy
and he is now the ghost we are carrying
through the streets like a coffin draped
in a flag, or something less heavy,
less corporeal. An officer in a white shirt
grabs my arm and I twist out and away
and pull my hood up too in the crowd
it is more like we are the sea and his body
is floating on us, not weighing us down,
we exist to hold him because we are
no graveyard, we are a place for the not-real,
for the things that once existed and exist
no more, a child next to me climbs up
on her father’s shoulder and I wonder
what she can see from there, within
the bodies there is no sense of scale, only that
we fill the streets curb to curb, only
that we are heading south to Zuccotti
Park as though there will be something
when we get there, and when we get there
there are only cops guarding the
empty park its bare benches and concrete floor
and would could be there besides
memory, anyway.

- NYPD Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, Vice magazine