Kenneth l. Clark
Last night at the truck stop we refueled our bodies with burnt
coffee, the van with gasoline and you played pinball for twenty
minutes as we waited, engine at idle.
The cost of protests won't compare on balance sheets, or line
items vetoed from the spreadsheets of memory—there's only the
deadbeat cement to reckon with;
the cold drums over the chants and shouts.
The rumor of anti-protest protests meanders around
the crowd; the clownmanship outdone by photographers
shooting photographers.
Nobody here wants to make war and they don't want love either:
they want anonymous encounters with people who listen to what
they believe in; their nods
in unison with bodies lunging against each other. They want
juggling men on stilts to make sense of bean bag shotguns, people
dying for a reason in a world without.