Owen Smith

Some years before he passed, he was moonlighting as the president of a committee to  more sympathetically represent teenage gas station attendants in horror films. I came to see him in

his room at the Tulsa YMCA, as I was at that point developing a suicidal
urge to work in Hollywood. We spoke over glasses of the local water.

He told me he had remarried, that she was lovely and worked as a nurse,
that he had / somehow been turned on to Aphex Twin, but some things

were the same: his evening hobby still was remembering
the events of Ruby Ridge. When he

was finally arrested, we called it
a beautiful moment on live TV and felt like a nation.

Born in a vacuum cleaner explosion, his early relationship with the
dramaturgic / concept of The Gun would have been an oft subject of study

for the old poets of psychoanalysis, though unfortunately at that point
they / were all too wrapped up in the semantic molasses of subjectivity.

In the hours leading up to the incident, images occurred to him in his
slumber / of peaceful house fires and places called Springfield and

aunts and a buried memory of hearing the word ‘gnostic,’ thinking
it referred to an obscure medical condition. When he woke up,

it had already started happening, and the broken glass at his knees
felt too much like a polaroid of a polaroid, like loneliness.

One of the more revealing lines from his manifesto would have read
‘and this is all stolen’ had he written

one at all. He died in a remote pony accident, / a favorite event of confusedly emasculated fathers on their way to fill the doorframe.

Their sons, meanwhile, all disappeared into obscure one-liners about the Amish
only to turn up five years later in Barcelona or Brussels or in East Peru,

Iowa, where the local economy has fallen on hard times, which
I won’t tell you because it’s tragic to feel sympathy for a gunman.

The dwindling popularity of horsepower magazines is a tough concept / to grapple with, and I’d understand if you wanted to create a greater sense of

distance between yourself and him, between yourself and a lost nation that conceives of woodworking as a complex metaphor for freedom.

Meanwhile, graduate students at the community college are making ice
sculptures of / famous escaped convicts and plotting to tattoo the word ‘nationalism’

on their temples. They are procrastinating: they have been asked to
outline theses on / this complex set of ethics we are faced with,

as we are, of course, fundamentally
empathetic, but we also harbor an innate fear of bullets.