"When I'm God, everyone dies"

Two California teenagers were arrested before they were able to carry out a massacre of their schoolmates and then commit suicide. Reminiscent of the Columbine atrocity, wherein a dozen students were killed, these California students hoped to copy the Columbine killers whom they idolized....

When asked to explain why, the students told police:

The boys told investigators that they planned to kill Quartz Hill students who had made fun of them, using guns and homemade explosives, then commit suicide, Brown said.

On Friday, deputies at the sheriff's station in Lancaster displayed a page from the 15-year-old's notebook with the scrawled message: "When I'm God, everyone dies."

I have written about this type of teenage angst in a lengthy essay. I'm not satisfied with the various psychological and sociological explanations privded so far for why students kill other students.

Is it society that creates such dark and secret spaces where kids like this can hide and lose themselves? Is our society so narcissistic that it repels anyone else who's different so much that they react violently to a scoiety that rejects them as much as they reject it?

After a student on the Red Lake Reservation killed himself and 10 others, I wrote the following poem:

I am not you
I am not him
or her or them
I am I
I am not
what you think

I see worlds where pain's joy
I track blood like a zombie
I am the pain I feel
and the pain I am is you

a word with no sound
empty and void
no word
to say who or what I am
no word to say what I did

tears and blood and
wordless tornado
that tunnels in dust
and repels the sun

this story that's me
the key
that I am
unlocks nothing
but a voiceless yell
that fills the red air

I go nowhere now
and take you with me
my pain my fear my joy

I do not want this pain alone
we can share
there where I am not
where you are not
we are not
------------------------------------------------
I cannot go
I will not
I am not what I am

I do not want this body
I do not want you
I do not want me
I do not want I