He learned the grammar of the failing lung,
The lexicon of monitors and drips,
The dialect that ventilators sung,
The silence balanced on a patient’s lips.
He sat with men the battlefield had hollowed
And stayed in rooms their nightmares had swallowed.

A Wisconsin boy who sang in childhood choirs,
Who chose the ordinary and slow,
Who felt no thirst for what the world admires
But walked toward the wounds that didn’t show.
At thirty-seven, rooted, unadorned,
He worked the hours the privileged scorned.

The veterans at the VA knew his gait,
The steadiness arriving with his shift,
His quiet way of making anguish wait
While turning his mere presence to a gift.
They’d given years to wars the flags paraded;
He met them when their welcome home had faded.

That January morning, bleak and pale,
He stepped into the street with phone in hand—
No megaphone, no flag, no coat of mail,
Just conscience he could never countermand.
A woman crumpled underneath the spray;
He moved toward her. Healers move that way.

They blinded him with chemical and force,
And found a gun still holstered at his waist,
And then pursued their vigilante course:
Ten rounds—administered, executioner’s haste.
No tourniquet, no hand reached out to save—
The frozen street became his unmarked grave.

The man who spent his years defending breath,
Who held the dying steady through the night,
Was designated threat and shot to death
By men who’d never sat with fading light.
They branded him a terrorist, a foe,
Then justified their murder in the snow.

Those who knew him called the narrative a lie,
As we must do when language turns obscene.
The autocrat described him fit to die,
Like vermin swept to keep the homeland clean.
But cameras caught what power cannot erase,
And somewhere, someone knows each hidden face.

What caliber of cowardice requires
A mask, a weapon, a target unarmed?
What doctrine bends protection till it fires
On those who’ve only healed, and never harmed?
Who tracked his footsteps? Who ordained the street?
The questions gnaw. They multiply. They feast.

A republic rots before the light of day;
It fractures through the silences we tend,
The moments when we waver, look away,
Expendable—the lives we won’t defend.
When healers fall for lifting strangers up,
We share the guilt. We drank the poisoned cup.

Say slowly what his thirty-seven years
Were worth—relentless shifts, the steady hands,
The calmness that dismantled all the fears
Of those returning from the broken lands.
Say Alex Pretti—syllables soaked in pain,
Like pressure on a wound that bears our name.