Whilst Crossing the Street

I take a left I've taken a hundred times and see a police van blocking the road, the officer outside his car waving traffic the other way. Two fire trucks scream the night down with wailing sirens, splashing the buildings in blue light. A red car, splayed across both lanes, reflects these flashes in its crumpled steel frame, windows shattered, side-door bent and twisted out of shape. An ambulance crew work, bathed by the strobes, pulling a corpse from the crushed, buckled steel, laying him down on the floor and wrapping him up like a portion of fish and chips. Directly opposite this, forty urbanites sit in a Gourmet Burger Restaurant, chewing on undigested red meat, munching and chomping on thick slabs of bloodied minced beef. They are the unaffected, the disaffected, tragedy a joke they forgot to laugh at. They stare at the death that surrounds them, and, as if watching television, they glaze over, immuned by the glass pane they look through. This is what living in the city is, a sickness that seeps through the concrete, that pours from the high rises, that spreads in the apathy of the contagious, every avoided gaze and cold-shouldered walk-on deepening the rot. And it is no way to live.