that stay open late, not thinking about

the wellbeing of the low-wage employees

who have to be there.

 

I hate him. And yet here we are,

walking down this glorified strip mall

queue of hovering glowing signs.

Through the window, we see a carousel

of greeting cards, a shelf of new releases

and bestsellers, names we recognize but have never read.

 

The streets are packed with poorly parked SUVs

and the sedans and city buses that have to navigate around them,

 

bicyclists jumping onto the sidewalk

to avoid being another statistic on the morning news.

 

Brick path, unmaintained.

Think about sinking through like that Pittsburgh city bus,

right in downtown during Monday morning rush hour,

 

revealing decades worth of rotting infrastructure.

And we’ll talk about the bus,

but we’ll never talk about why it happened.

 

And we’ll never read the books we bought,

rushing our choices because the store

closed earlier than he thought it did.

 

© Miss Macross