Running for Your Life: Jamaican Mood

Grilled gate in what seems the middle of nowhere on this fantasy island, rum punch and jerk meat, all you can drink and eat, heavenly days, nasty broken green glass embedded in concrete, countless mind-numbing, self-medicated drunks unshameable, what Russell Banks writes about in “Book of Jamaica,” how much worse it is to lift up the poor with promises of real hope, real change and then see the elites thrive as before, in change, as always, is the better for them, ideals meaningless, soon does not come, hail the accident of birth, eye contact at the risk of a dull, dirty knife stabbed in your chest:

TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT; SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN

In America, death to others, life to the few is embedded in code, screen silos with sides so slippery there are no footholds, climbing walls the illusion, “citizens” “play” their role, with all the clout of Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the Conservatory, not a soul who isn’t moving their pieces around the board, keeping true to the rules, not crossing the lines of the spaces, tidy tiles, little coffins; life to the few has long lost interest in the “players,” not even to mock them as suckers, a waste of time on the useless class, futurist Yuval Harari’s term …

On this remote road, a year goes by and the number of “citizens” from beyond this fantasy island who see the sign above that appears on the grilled gate never comes close to a wink of an eye, the human traffic in Times Square, to be shocked by the unmasking of the truth: death to others. Hate is the natural state. To believe otherwise accept the limitations of your place, mind-numb yourself in drink, drugs, the current global intoxicant, self-improvement, make your phone your gym.

Next: Running for Your Life: Goodbye Larry Poem