Fugitives by Nels Hanson

With your cameras you can film
the recent tragic massacre
as grotesque slow-motion ballet,
the would-be victims’ faces

at last sincere with awe and terror,
a post-modern late-decadent
Rococo. You can man a station
on our moon that has no air,

weak gravity, days and nights 
each 13 days and half a day, 
the silver mercury dropping 
five hundred degrees Fahrenheit 

but glance at Earth and you recall
you’re safe. You can do all kinds of 
things, die as you watch yourself 
in mirrors or at night beyond a lake, 

that grove of cypress. There it’s 
dark enough to lurk until a doctor 
on the run can change this face, 
cut, sew and tell a suspect always

innocent that convicts crashing out 
break into prison, all the wardens
are fugitives. What can I do or be? 
The hidden one who hides you?

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