holding hands is optional

On the bus a guy sits smoking, blasting tinny white rap from the speaker of his tinny white phone. We sit there in toleration, in silent meekness as he inflicts this aural violation on us. This is violence, an act of out and out aggression, a call to confrontation if any one should consider themselves worthy. But this will not be risen to, not here, no-one wants their story to end like this, on a W3 to Finsbury Park, who wants to die fighting over the volume of faux hip-hop? So we crumble, yield and demur, we live with inaction, paralysed in this deep, creeping sense of paranoia.