Broken City
A poem
“Everything is weird and everyone is wrecked.” — Rebecca Solnit
Can you feel it?
Can you feel the life being sucked out of you by this relentless machine?
Can you feel the concrete being poured into every crack and crevice,
the possibility of any true art being stifled and suffocated like a
wildflower in the path of a runway?
Can you feel the shame being pumped like poison into the rivers of your psyche,
the fear fed daily on an intravenous drip,
the truckload of traumatising information being dumped on the forest of your dreams?
Can you feel the edges of your humanity start to fray?
Your attention span depleted like a drought-ridden reservoir, your empathy degraded, scathed?
Are your days soul-parched, cracked and arid as an industrial monoculture field, yearning for colour and creaturely life?
Can you feel yourself falling — as though tipping from standing —
as the world burns and melts around you?
How many years have you been in fight-or-flight?
Running as fast as you can as the ground falls away,
while grief swells like a tidal wave on the horizon
and the chasm of separation churns up its own hurricane?
Can you feel yourself turning away because you just can’t any more?
Shutting off to keep going?
I can, and I’m convinced it’s no coincidence:
Someone’s getting rich off our serrated nerves,
our shattered dreams and meaningless social contracts,
the constant, droning background…
