Active Shooter / The Game

[Isis]

I'm trying to make sense of the title and poem in combination. I'm reading this as the description of a video game, but maybe it's a description of shooting someone from a detached point of view, someone who views real life as a game? I'm not sure; there aren't a lot of concrete touchstones for the poem outside of the gun in the hands and the target hitting the ground. Much of the poem could be interpreted multiple ways, particularly these stanzas. My comments are in blue.

Take
your turn.
Next tick.
At the beginning, it could be that the speaker is handing a gun to someone else, or getting handed a gun; based on the way the poem is written throughout, though, it seems like he's addressing his enemy. Next tick: a ticking clock, or a tick on the butt of the gun for every man killed, the tick of a kill counter in a game going up? Lots of ways to read this. Not sure if you want us to read it lots of ways though.

Push
my pride?
You'll pay.
On one level this is really clear, but again it leaves the context wide open. Who is the speaker in competition with, the enemy or a teammate, a fellow soldier?



Lose
the light.
Next life.
The light could be seen in a lot of ways: the light going out of the dead man in the dirt. The light of the gun's laser sight getting turned off, or lost in darkness. Or it could be standing for other things more tangentially related to the scene in the poem. Next life: the dead moving into the next life, or the speaker getting ready to take another life, lining up his next kill?

Is this a poem that should contain ambiguities like the ones I've talked about, or are you driving at a particular narrative that you want the reader to 'get'?

It's kind of disconcerting to have a description of killing just focused on the act, but we do get glimpses of the internal world of the speaker, like the stanza about pride and "armed with angst". Both of those tell us about the emotional world of the speaker, or how he sees it … but the terseness of both word and form in the poem suggests an extreme distance from emotion. I think the poem is strongest where it's concrete, it's physical: lines about the clip, the blast, the drop to dirt feel most in line with the clipped, tight, sort of mysterious nature of the poem. Like someone in the middle of tunnel vision, only able to see and feel the gun and the enemy. I'm not sure that's the direction you want to take this poem but it's one direction that could work.