If batons and bullets
and sticks and stones
and gas and grenades
could rid the world
of every spine
that dared to stand up and ask why,
or worse, say no,
revolution would be a museum artifact,
behind glass,
with a little plaque explaining
how humanity once mistook obedience for peace.
The ones who belong in museums
keep finding crowns,
mistaking the present for their kingdom
and the past for an inheritance.
The guillotine, too,
was once a government instrument.
A fish develops legs,
crawls onto land,
invents a mortgage,
and spends the next several millennia
trying to get back indoors.
We call this civilisation.
We spend millions of years evolving on the earth,
billions of dollars extracting things from it,
and the rest of our lives trying to get as far away from it as possible.
Eventually, we discover concrete.
Sand. Stone. Water. Cement.
The earth, after a brief and involuntary career in geology, gets promoted to real estate.
Mountains become raw materials.
Rivers become supply chains.
Beaches become investment opportunities.
And the species responsible for the arrangement
starts advertising harmony with nature
in brochures featuring infinity pools.
The infinity pool is particularly inspired.
We have managed to make water look infinite
by putting it in a rectangle
beside a planet running out of it.
Civilisation is full of these little triumphs.
We excavate mountains to build skyscrapers,
then stand on the forty-seventh floor and admire the view.
We put fences around land
that existed before the concept of a fence.
Draw borders across geological formations
that have never heard of countries.
Print deeds establishing ownership of a planet
that has been operating quite comfortably without a legal department
for four and a half billion years.
Somewhere, a tectonic plate is moving a few centimetres a year,
entirely unaware that it has violated somebody's property line.
We are the only species
that can stand on borrowed ground
and demand the owner produce identification.
And then there's sand.
Sand is what happens
when a mountain spends a few million years breaking itself down.
We looked at this and thought:
Excellent. Construction material.
Not every grain of sand is suitable for concrete, of course.
Its usefulness depends on where it came from,
how it was shaped, and what it can do.
River sand, desert sand, crushed rock.
Geology has its specifications.
Even the earth has a quality-control department.
We have a procurement team.
And our procurement team has been having a spectacular century.
We dredge rivers until their beds begin to collapse.
Strip coastlines of what protects them,
then commission studies to determine why they are collapsing.
This is what we call progress:
making a problem expensive enough
that the people who created it can build careers solving it.
We will destroy a wetland
to build a luxury housing complex,
install artificial landscaping,
and advertise the development as an escape into nature.
The trees are ornamental.
The lake is a feature.
The birds are a bonus.
The entire ecosystem has been reduced to amenities.
Nature has finally found employment in the service industry.
It is not permitted to unionise, though.
We paved the earth against the rain,
then built drainage systems
to make the water someone else's problem.
The sky kept its appointments.
The soil could no longer keep them.
But the city looks beautiful at night.
This is important.
The city must look beautiful at night.
Otherwise, somebody might notice what it took to make it.
Every civilisation has its preferred method of concealing a crime from itself.
Ours uses architectural lighting.
Glass facades. Illuminated towers. Landscaped terraces.
A marketing department that can make the excavation of a mountain sound like a lifestyle upgrade.
Luxury redefined.
Usually by the square foot.
We have even managed to make impermanence aspirational.
Buy a home, they say.
Build equity.
Leave something behind for your children.
Leave them what, exactly?
A thirty-year repayment schedule?
A shrinking coastline?
A river converted into a municipal problem?
A city where the temperature is rising,
the groundwater is falling,
and the air purifier needs a replacement filter
that costs more than an entire village's monthly water bill?
Our ancestors left us rivers, forests, coastlines, and soil.
We are leaving our descendants the invoice.
And concrete. So much concrete.
Concrete is humanity's favourite love letter to permanence,
which is a little like writing a love letter to a corpse
because you appreciate its commitment to staying in one place.
We have spent thousands of years
building things that promise to outlast us,
and naming them after places we are busy destroying.
We are not the landlords of this planet.
We are an unusually destructive tenant
with a god complex, a construction loan,
and a remarkable talent for blaming the building when the plumbing fails.
The lease was never signed.
The deposit was never paid.
The landlord has never once acknowledged our existence.
And still, we keep renovating.
Because what else would we do with the time we have?
Sit on the ground?
Feel the sand between our fingers?
Look at a mountain without calculating its commercial potential?
Allow a river to be a river, a forest to be a forest,
a coastline to exist without somebody submitting a proposal?
That would be absurd.
We are civilised.
We have paperwork.
We have cranes.
We have an entire species dedicated to converting the things it cannot create into things it can sell.
And the fish?
The fish left the water,
crawled onto land,
invented a mortgage,
and spent several millennia trying to get back indoors.
And when it finally did,
it found the water waiting for it.
In a rectangle.
Earlier this morning, something incredible happened:
I was rejected by a machine that insisted nobody had taught it how to discriminate.
I asked who was responsible.
The representative said the algorithm.
I asked who had built it.
The engineer said management had specified the requirements.
Management said legal had approved the process.
Legal said the decision was consistent with policy.
I asked who had written the policy.
They sent me a link.
I read it.
The policy stated
that all decisions were made in accordance with applicable criteria.
I asked who had chosen the criteria.
They sent me another link.
This one explained how the system applied them.
I began to suspect
I was being fucked by a committee
that had outsourced the fucking
and retained the right to deny there had been any fucking at all.
I asked for a human being.
They said a human being was not required at this stage.
I asked when one would be required.
They said if I wished to appeal.
I appealed.
The appeal was reviewed
by the same system that had rejected me.
The appeal was rejected.
The system had considered my case from every possible angle.
Except the one from which I was a person.
I asked to speak to someone
who could overrule the decision.
They said no such person was available.
Not that the decision was irreversible.
Not that nobody had the authority.
Only that the person with the authority was unavailable.
I pictured them at lunch.
A sandwich in one hand.
My future in the other.
Both entirely disposable.
I asked when they would return.
The representative said they couldn't provide a timeline.
And then, they thanked me for my understanding.
I couldn't quite understand
what, precisely, I was supposed to understand.
That nobody had intended this?
That everybody had done their job?
That somewhere between
the person who wrote the rules
and the person who suffered them,
we had built a machine
that could make a human decision
without requiring a human being to stand behind it?
We used to need a person to look you in the eye while ruining your day.
Now we call that inefficiency.
I closed the browser.
The decision remained.
Somewhere, someone had made it.
Somewhere, someone could reverse it.
Somewhere, a person
was having a perfectly ordinary day, unaware
that doing nothing had become the most consequential thing
they'd done all year.
There was no villain to expose.
No monster to drag into the light.
Just a job well done,
a policy correctly applied,
a performance review to look forward to.
And me,
holding the consequences of a decision
nobody had made.
Don't write if you have nothing to say
that hasn't been said over and again,
in more ways than your vocabulary permits,
your imagination allows.
Don't borrow metaphors
like they're your neighbour's scissors
and you've misplaced yours.
Don't claim them either,
unless you got them as birthday gifts.
Don't scribble mindless mnemonics
until your brain freezes,
then inspect the wreckage
and call it literature.
Don't waste pages upon pages
if not one of them makes you angry,
teary, or dizzy
when you read them aloud in your head.
I know what they say.
Anyone can be an artist.
Anything can be art.
Well, they lie.
Delusion has sold more art supplies
than Nobel Prizes ever could.
Narcissism has slaughtered more trees
than greed ever would.
Because the world has never run short of people with something to say;
only of those who'll say what everyone thinks but no one else would.
Someone told me today
I should die.
Someone told me today
that a good man
lives with the consequences of his errors
every time he is told he has erred,
and that if he dares to question the telling,
he should die
to cleanse himself of the sin of asking.
Don't get me wrong.
I've been asked to die before.
In fact,
I've failed more death wishes than cats have lives.
I'm sure each of them had reasons.
Reasons grand enough to warrant a death.
Wetting a bed of expectations is a rather expensive crime,
I've been made to understand.
But today wasn't one of those days.
Today I was asked to die
because I had the audacity to question.
Today I was asked to die
because I had the arrogance to refuse surrender.
Today I was asked to die
because I had the gall to be allergic to commodes for mouths.
Today I was asked to die
because I had the tongue to read the law of the land aloud,
and the teeth to enunciate it,
to call a felony a statutory violation.
Someone told me today
I should die
because the creatures of convenience
lurking inside their nervous systems
whispered to them:
"He is the crime. He is the criminal."
Someone told me today
I should die
so they wouldn't have to live with their consequences.
And perhaps that, after all,
was the greatest crime I had committed:
I had refused to die
so they could bury me guilty.
I won't slit your throat.
What am I, a butcher?
I won't break your bones.
What am I, a thug?
I won't take your life.
What am I, the State?
I'll break your nerve.
Your nerves, actually. Plural.
I'll break them like they weren't.
And then I'll let you live.
Because the dead
can't spend the rest of their lives
waking in the middle of the night,
breaking into cold sweat,
wondering when I might return.
I'll leave you alive.
With your pulse intact.
Your doors locked.
Your windows shut.
And that little suspicion that none of it matters.
You'll wake up tomorrow.
Then the day after.
And every morning
will have to explain itself to you.
That's the kind of bastard I am.
Call me cruel.
Call me evil reincarnate.
Call me whatever you like.
The wound doesn't care what you name the knife.
I'm more of a sledgehammer, though.
Knives are too efficient.
They cut quick.
And what cuts quick doesn't cut deep.
A sledgehammer gives every surface
the depth it deserves.
That's how I have always imagined poetic justice;
when you want to plead with all your mouth and all your life for mercy,
but you have too little left of either.
If you must know, I take my poetry rather seriously.
Termites scream camaraderie,
hoping infestation will be mistaken for community,
fermenting folklore in their gassy guts:
"everyone with a gang is a gangster".
Until one morning, pest control arrives.
A lone silhouette,
unbothered by the arithmetic of mobs.
A hint of sulfuryl fluoride,
and camaraderie falls to its death,
like Communism in Soviet Russia, 1991.
Call it justice, vengeance, due process,
actualities have never bothered with etymology.
Sometimes,
sulfuryl fluoride is spelled Constitution.
