There are seven of us in front of the mayor’s house asking questions about the boy they shot twenty-two times
There are seven of us in front of the mayor’s house screaming about how the videotape of the shooting was covered up so that the mayor could get reelected
And a police officer says down there where they live there was a shooting you should be protesting that shooting a nine-year-old boy was shot by a gangbanger why aren’t you protesting that shooting why are you only protesting this shooting
Another police officer wants to know why we are protesting this shooting when just yesterday there was a drive-by shooting in Rogers Park and two innocent bystanders were shot and one of them died
We don’t answer instead we do a die-in in front of the mayor’s house and the camera crews from the nightly news stand above us as we lay stiff and motionless on the cold wet pavement
They shot the boy twenty-two times
They kept the video secret for a year and a few days after the video was released we took to the streets and didn’t let anyone into the Disney Store
We blocked the doors to Brooks Brothers
We blocked the doors to Topman
The Disney Store was empty but for a few sales folk standing around some Stormtroopers
A guy who drove up from Indiana tried to get into the Disney Store and when we told him that nobody would be buying Stormtroopers today he spat on us and called us stupid assholes
This place is for kids Y’all are fucked up
We didn’t let anyone into the Apple Store
No one got into Banana Republic
A police officer pulled one of us out from in front of Banana Republic and asked us why we weren’t protesting the other bodies that were shot by bodies that were not police officers
It was a strange line of questioning
But it kept happening
The cops kept asking why the body they shot was more important to us than the bodies shot by others
Because you took an oath to protect people we said not to kill them
Because you are paid to protect people not to shoot them
Then they filmed us and we were on the nightly news dying-in on the cold wet pavement
And the politicians called us anticapitalist terrorists who wanted to close down the city’s access to commerce
Then the public forgot about the boy they shot twenty-two times and the mayor closed fifty public schools and replaced them with privately run charters
And the mayor said we must make our school system more robust we must make our schools more efficient we can no longer have empty schools we can no longer have failing schools we can no longer have public schools we can no longer have public bodies
And he proposed a plan for privatizing all of the bodies of all the residents of Chicago
And the City Council passed the proposal and we were given physical examinations injected with vaccines and told we had quite a bit to learn from those who devoted their lives to prayer meditation and nonviolent disobedience
We had no choice
This was the dream they subjected us to
They took us to Lake Michigan to the prisons on the beach on the northern end of the city on the border with Evanston on the sand they imported from Indiana
The police build bonfires to remind us of the bodies they throw into them
They tell us cautionary tales about the secret prison on the west side where once they killed a man by chaining him to a radiator that fell on his head
They tell us this and they expect us to hate them but when you are a decrepit privatized body who has not been fed for several days it’s not always possible to feel something as violent as hatred
And they say why do you think you are here
And we say we exist in a historical continuum our comrades in the sixteenth century were also not told why they were imprisoned or tarred or killed
And they say we have video recordings of you torching your neighbors’ garages
And they say we have video recordings of you hiding guns and money under the floorboards of your houses
And they say where in your heart is love
And we say it is everywhere it is all that we have there is nothing else to hang on to when you are in the back of a pickup truck handcuffed to other decrepit privatized bodies rolling around and your heads keep smashing other heads and your shoes keep kicking other faces and other shoes keep kicking your face and you are bleeding and you are terrified and you are blindfolded and you are in the back of a pickup truck and no one has given you enough time to call your father your friend your mother your brother your lover your x your y you are nothing but a rotten piece of meat they tell us as our broken bodies roll around the back of the truck
This is an attempt to provide context for the insignificant reality of our lives
This is an attempt to provide context for the dreams we have in which we swallow the bodies of the police officers the prison guards the mayor the migra
These are our dreams we digest the bodies that destroy us
They throw us in the back of a wagon take us to a holding cell and when we are released we gather in front of the mayor’s house who is vacationing in Cuba with his family
And the police officers say we have better things to do than stand here and make sure you don’t burn down the mayor’s house or shoot a journalist or go crazy and shoot yourselves
Then one of us puts a shoe on the mayor’s lawn and they throw her to the ground put a knee to the back of her neck handcuff her tell her she is under arrest for trespassing
And we all step onto the mayor’s lawn and the police officers throw us to the ground hold their sticks to our necks put their knees to our backs pull our hair handcuff us take us to a holding cell where we are separated one from the other and we cannot call our lawyers our friends our families and we scream from our cells until they tape our mouths shut
But who will document our deaths and disappearances we wonder
Who will inscribe our bodies into history
Who will know that at one point in this life we were something other than what the bureaucrats knew us to be
And we are alone for several hours until they bring us trays of stale food and dirty water
A few days pass we lose track of time we have no watches no phones no way of knowing where we are or what time it is then an authoritative voice says take these putrid bodies out to get some sunshine
And we go out into the grass and there is a lawyer and a psychologist and a bureaucrat waiting to interview us to ask us what it is that we want
We are silent
So they beat us
And when we say please don’t beat us they say finally you are getting the hang of it finally you are learning how to articulate your deepest dreams and desires
And they like this
So they beat us
And when they finish beating us they feed us
And when they finish feeding us they throw dollar bills on the floor and force us to play a game where we must beat each other in order to get the dollar bills and if we don’t beat each other they beat us
Sing they say or we will beat you
And so we sing what they tell us to sing
We love you we sing
We love your money we sing
We love your food we sing
We love your guns boots and nightsticks
And they like this song so they beat us
They pay us and they love us and they beat us