din

They're designing park benches so that homeless people can't sleep on them and placing metal spikes beneath overpasses so they can't be used as shelter. Jerry Seinfeld says Palestine doesn't exist and that sometimes socks go missing in the dryer, wocka wocka ha ha ha it's funny because it's a witty observation about life's everyday little goofy goofs. Fast food wrappers blow in the wind like the leaves used to do. Duct-taped gargoyles with garbage bag wings peer down at the din of civilization as we march over the sidewalk sleepers to our Jobs, stepping over dead bodies while staring at our phones and counting the minutes til we can go home to our sofas and watch wocka wocka comedians and shovel SSRIs into our faces from large plastic bowls so the crushing beauty of our world and the knowledge of our mortality doesn't topple us like Jenga blocks and make us weep like open fire hydrants. In this din they don't want you to feel. They don't want you to think. They don't want you to hear. They keep it all CLANG, CLANG, CLANG, BUY, BUY, BUY, WORK, WORK, WORK, WOCKA, WOCKA, WOCKA, so that you can't feel your body. So that you can't hear the songs. There's bird song and whale song and heart song and lung song. There's fire song and sea song and wind song and tree song. There's ancestor song and mountain song and sun song and wolf song, and lots of others I bet; I can't hear any of them. Oh, except thought song, which blasts through my head like a sonic homeless deterrent in a shopping center alleyway, and, like them, I have nowhere else to go. ____________ Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.