A Song For Sueng-Hui Cho

I saw the outtakes of your tapes—
the ones you took time out to mail
between shooting sprees.
You had
killed two already and would soon
kill thirty more, before yourself.
Thirty-three people, dead. Thirty-
three families left bereaved
including, grievously,
your own. I saw you brandishing
the pistols you had bought,
in some mad mimicry
of those martyr tapes of terrorists,
arms spread, eyes fierce
and focused on the plan
you had worked out
to wreak your vengeance on humanity.
I heard your rant—those parts
of it the network judged
fit to air—the spew of words
that must have seemed quite logical
to you, in your derangement.
And watching you, I thought
how easily the brain
can slip between that sane
and necessary sense of mission,
for a man, and vainglorious
obsession; how love
and hate are only
two sides of a coin; and how
your peculiar, deadly dedication
and crazed intensity
might well have served, in only
slightly altered circumstances, to save life
rather than destroy it.
Where good-hearted people
stood by to offer help,
your mind saw nothing
other than rejection—no more,
really, than a twist in the hardwiring
of the brain. I saw
a sad boy
desperate to prove himself
a man, and not knowing how,
unless by “killing Dick”—
your own revealing words—
in one ultimate, outrageous
gesture of hatred and defiance.
For this, in rage,
you found fault in everyone
around you but
yourself, and left us
gazing without solace, without
explanation, deep into the murk
of our own human souls.