Lake Michigan, Scene 11.
15 men around a van from the Department
of Streets and Sanitation.
The men pushed from the side and back.
The van is rocking up and down.
It's starting to tip.
More men come to the side.
Nine pushes and it bounces, but it doesn't quite flip,
and a bunch of men walk away as a horn blares loudly
as if telling the men to stop.
The mechanics of flipping a van over, push until it's bouncing,
and once it bounces high enough lift from the bottom.
11 more pushes and the van falls over onto the driver's side
and there is a celebratory whoop,
as the men walk away knowing that no one is ahead
of his time.
A riot is the thing that decides how it is to be done,
and who among these men wants to consider
the very long history of how he has ever acted
or how he has ever felt?
What do they see when they looked at the flipped over van?
The flipped over van, a long pole busting the glass,
the fire and the smoke bombs, the men and women
with scarves over their faces taking what they can
from the municipal vehicles.
The war that has formed their relationship
to the composition of the city, the war that
has formed the police officer's punitive relationship
to the bodies that occupy the city.
The innocence of rudimentary violence
is the devouring power of negation.
Who are the bodies when the bodies are not
flipping over the van?
What do they wish to compose when they are not composing
the destruction of the city?
What do they feel about the city and its refusal to absorb them?
What do they feel about the state and its desire
to spit them out?
How will they be absorbed and how will they be ejected?
There's distribution, and there is despair,
and there are the things we decide to see when we look,
and the things we decide to see when we
shield our eyes from the pain.
What else is there to be done once the van has
been flipped over?
What steps do we need to take to create
lasting structural changes in our neighborhood,
our city, our nation?
How many vans should be flipped over and in what order?
They ponder these questions with screams, flames, and poles
jammed into the glass of cars and storefronts,
jammed into the burden to transact, compose, destroy.