I knew the boy was to be beheaded—so did you
We just did not yet know how or when. The actual headline
Read: “Teen Decapitated In Six Flags Accident.” A summer
Death in the month of marriages—seventeen years old,
He hopped two fences to retrieve a hat that had fallen
From the Batman roller coaster—beheaded by a roller coaster
Named for a dark knight—an unbelievable epitaph, and now
A soon to be trivial oddity. His name was Asia—his entire life
Must have been exotic. We all knew it—that he would die—
I did at a matinee looking at the Batman movie poster
With a sense of dread, thinking of Michael Caine as a pallbearer.
He had to have that guillotine; this boy barely post puberty
Had to die to make the ink this black, the comic book a good movie,
The park close down, the press kit luminous, the Atlanta smog
Alert on orange—children and elderly beware of the air—die
He must to make the danger there for us in our air-conditioned
Hives and caves in the nocturnal enclaves where we know within
What is next, how it will be, who will die, and we are not surprised.