master puppet

the jingles used to go ohahoh
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The city at dusk stumbles heavily home, blinking on and off lazy lights over the slow swoosh-swoosh of sweeping. Still buzzed from a night of drinking it slowly puts its face on, every morning this darling routine making it like old again. Garbage trucks remove signs of human involvement on the city floor bed and every skyscraper stands strong, peering down at us. Every weekday at dusk I walk to work, I see this. I walk to work the way I do because I cannot stand the faces of the people on the subway, hung heavy from their cheekbones – those sullen, distorted, dead faces that stay frozen at the jolting halt of the train or the beating can of the performer. And when I walk down streets the way I do, I walk and I think

Don’t you know there is a war going on?

Burning blood is snaking out of punctured bodies somewhere. Because of us, there are dead eyelids shocked open over a belly full of bullets. The street sweeper sweeps the streets, the skyline looks the same. Crossing avenues I see that the city is the creation of people. Every street corner, every 28th story, every gum-stain, and each fruit stall is there because someone put it there. When a person is sick, his windows are closed and the eyes of the building are shut. When the insomniac is soliloquizing at nighttime, her bedroom is wide-eyed and bright and delirious. The city is the manifestation of the human, who feels pain and a little paranoia at the sight of death and blood. We are its puppet-master. But here we are, playing a funny game of role reversal: like the city, which will keep its skyline intact over nightly homicides and rapes and overdoses, I see people’s faces and they are still uniform. There is a war going on and they are still uniform.