The Straying Math of Dogs and Bullets

The news never stops, but sometimes it breaks
strange, like when the cops tell us,
Man throws dog at sister.

It didn't fly far, but across town,
the Police [did] finally catch [another] stray dog
on [the] Eisenhower Expressway.

I hear it's driving a '98 Toyota Corolla,
which has nothing to do with
the 3 critically injured
when [their] vehicle hits [a] pole
on [the] Kennedy Expressway.

They could be spooked by the report
that a Suburban girl, 11, threatened
to shoot up [her] school bus.

She's been told pink bullets
are the latest preteen fad,
and to prove her absurd point,
there's more bad news of
2 children injured in [a] Far South Side shooting.

Add their names to the piled-up statistics
and the multiple PR reasons
an often divided
[State] Legislature [and Mayor] Daley [will try again]
to crack down on gun violence.

This equation's always out of balance.

---

It's Day 29 of NaPoWriMo and yes that means only one more day of Challenge fun left. Today's prompt from ReadWritePoem is front page news. The task is to take 5 to 10 headlines from a favorite news source and build a story out of them. My seven headlines all came from the Chicago Sun-Times Website. They're in italics, and I smoothed them out a little with bracketed additions.