Untitled Document


Kao: Face Gary Chang	photos by Hal Lum

i. Attitude
	The worst mass murder in state history touches off a massive manhunt. The suspect surrenders near the Hawai‘i Nature Center. A gunman shot and killed seven people at a Nimitz Highway office this morning in Hawaii’s worst mass murder ever.
	Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 2, 1999
Practice paid off, Byron, bullets fragging those silhouettes. Nobody had a hope. Just like any other Thursday, you walked in,
killed seven of them.
What happened, braddah? They never eat
the hayden mangoes you tried for share, smiled
too loud you never go their parties?
first whack the torso, slowed ‘em down; second round between their eyes. Like Sonny Crockett in “Miami Vice,” or maybe Matrix.
One after another. When your magazine
ran dry, you popped in another. Snick.
Fuck the media. Wasn’t
that. Never even need your Glock,
high-cap mags.
	Only had seven.
You let one slide through, Byron. Mistake.
Snick.
Star-Bulletin reported if wasn’t
for him, no more witnesses. Outside that room nobody even knew what you’d done.
When you walked to your car,
drove to Tantalus, nearest cop was still half-a-mile down Nimitz Highway, in the Zips just Diamond-head of Xerox.


ii. Hope Your Father No Kill Himself
How long you went sit in the Xerox van? Mil-Dot kissing your cheek, SWAT-Team Captain bull-horned,
“Bryan Uyesugi.”
You never even hear them handcuff you, news-guy taking your picture.
	All fled, all gone
	So lift me on the pyre
	All our guests have left,
	And the lamp expires

I watched your father on KITV, Byran. CNN Innocence, that’s what the reporter figured. But your daddy, Hiro, never tell her what she wanted:
“I going take one gun
down the police station,” he said, “let my son finish the job.”
	After you lost face, I don’t know how for find you.
	Where you stay now?
“Police Place Uyesugi Under ‘Suicide-Watch’” that night. Ten o’clock news, next morning’s Advertiser, everybody thought they knew.
First-time Hawai‘i: Employee
goes “Postal.” Not even that right. You went Xerox. Copy-Cat Killer,
No ka ‘oi, braddah. Number one.


iii. Not Only You No Go Their Parties, Byran

I kicked Fear, my Black Lab when he ignored, disobeyed,
“Get out the way,”
purple van bearing down on him.
Puritan in the van stopped,
reversed, “Fucker, don’t you ever kick your dog.”
No problem, mea culpa. I leashed the hound. Didn’t look at haole
“You hear me, fucker?” Asshole drove alongside, “don’t look the other way when I’m talking to you.” Stopped even with me, “You live around here?”
“Right there,” pointed out my house. Started walking again.
Boots got out of the van, smacked asphalt. “I see you kick your dog again, I’ll break your ass.”
Huh.
“You hear me?”
Approached me,
closed the ten feet.	not his space.
	Fuck-face now in mine.


“I fuckin ever see you kick your dog again,”
	“go for it.” Release
	Fear, he growls
	Please, please, call
	me “Chink.”
	Please.

Footnote Suicide poem found in the typewriter of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Destroyer. In 1936, distressed that his mother would probably not survive her coma, Howard shot himself. His mother died the next day. Funeral services were joint.



Just two of us, Fear and I, seek breath on the Fossil Creek Prairie. Two hawks cast above these dog holes. One swoops

flesh goes diving. Whistling
surrounds us. I can hear tearing, raptor on the ground’s beak comes up with sinew. Bloody carcass half-in, half-out its hole. Second hawk keeps circling. Fear backs off the young cottontail bolting ten feet off his nose, terrified.
	I stare at your card, Pat. What you wrote when I left home, left the ‘ohana.
Day before workshop all I write comes up white space. Rain strikes us, chop breaks on this reservoir’s surface. No geese honk today. Fear returns to me and we slip home through the storm.
	All you wrote, friend Pat
	you poet, my anchor, but three
	words:
	“No Make Shame.”


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