There’s trouble down
With the junior highs
Buses full, curbed
Teens watch as the vice
Principal manhandles two boy
Thugs bloodied
By their barefisted
Brawl off a wooded path
Somewhere down Brummer’s
Back to the office now
For further punishment
The warrriors are weary and spent
No fury to spare for authority figures
The leather jacket one wears
Has a separated shoulder
Even through the dirty window
You can see the welts and bruises
On knuckled heads and forearms
Lips broken open and eyes streaked red
Up at the higher school
Sheets of glass lie shattered
On the hallway linoleum
By a young tough’s elbow thrown
Back at the wrong time
In a tussle with a short, swart foe
Even I saw it happen
And I too thought the act deliberate
A killer’s instinct to put a locked head
Through plate and sever an artery
A few weeks from now
A sophomore’s immaculate ride will be
Hammered mercilessly with bats
At the Herfy’s on the highway
And the ditch down the street
Not so long ago held the pummeled
And unconscious body
Of a visiting team’s fan
Basketball can be a rough
Sport in this town called Tukwila
For it’s violence we seem to foster
And not much else, they say
But it’s the bicentennial year
That I live in this
War of yet-dependents
Not 2014
And all these boys are white
Yes, poverty and provinciality
Black-and-blue collared depredation
Are the true majority of this age