JOHNSTONE

Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley

Readings of all Caitlin Johnstone's articles, usually by her co-writer Tim Foley.

  1. din

    1d ago

    din

    They're designing park benches so that homeless people can't sleep on them and placing metal spikes beneath overpasses so they can't be used as shelter. Jerry Seinfeld says Palestine doesn't exist and that sometimes socks go missing in the dryer, wocka wocka ha ha ha it's funny because it's a witty observation about life's everyday little goofy goofs. Fast food wrappers blow in the wind like the leaves used to do. Duct-taped gargoyles with garbage bag wings peer down at the din of civilization as we march over the sidewalk sleepers to our Jobs, stepping over dead bodies while staring at our phones and counting the minutes til we can go home to our sofas and watch wocka wocka comedians and shovel SSRIs into our faces from large plastic bowls so the crushing beauty of our world and the knowledge of our mortality doesn't topple us like Jenga blocks and make us weep like open fire hydrants. In this din they don't want you to feel. They don't want you to think. They don't want you to hear. They keep it all CLANG, CLANG, CLANG, BUY, BUY, BUY, WORK, WORK, WORK, WOCKA, WOCKA, WOCKA, so that you can't feel your body. So that you can't hear the songs. There's bird song and whale song and heart song and lung song. There's fire song and sea song and wind song and tree song. There's ancestor song and mountain song and sun song and wolf song, and lots of others I bet; I can't hear any of them. Oh, except thought song, which blasts through my head like a sonic homeless deterrent in a shopping center alleyway, and, like them, I have nowhere else to go. ____________ Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

    2 min
  2. Rumbling

    Jun 20

    Rumbling

    If you can hear the whales through your glowing foot roots, then stand up. Open your mouth. Let their aria rip through you. Let it pound up and out so the others can find you. Burrrp! Now’s not the time for politeness, my love. We’re staring down mass extinction. We don’t have time to be cool. Care! It’s fine! There’s a rumbling in your belly. Can you feel it? An inner ocean, still teeming with luminescent jellyfish, dulled by a thin coat of plastic, immortal but dying anyway. For so many their foot roots have withered away somewhere in between an Uber shift and a Door Dash, and besides, their heart, rick-roll racketed by rent scam subscriptions, beats too loud and fast to hear any stupid whales. Exhausted bodies hosting ghosts running on foodless food and godless gods, too sick and tired to look up to see, to know what’s happening in our name, to understand that the cold blue eyes of the empire of whiteness stamped on our every dollar bill that we are forced to pray for fervently each night, “Please God please God Please may I pay my bills God Please may I feed my children God Please may we keep this roof God Please may you give me more money God Please oh money God Please oh please I don’t want to die Please give me your demon dollars Made from the bones of African child slaves Pressed from the meat of the babies of Gaza Printed with the oil made from the blood sacrifices of Chevron Paper gods every one I know not where they come from Or how they are made And I might die of grief if I did Just give me some more of your green demon prayer cards So that I might live Another day, Amen.” That is not you. You pray of course (we all must), but you, you hear the whales. And there are others. You can tell us by the flowers of light sprouting from our eye stalks and noggin crowns, from our bellowing war cries roaring through us giving voice to our blue mama, her rainforest hair slick with oil but beautiful still. Reading by Tim Foley.

    3 min
4.7
out of 5
187 Ratings

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Readings of all Caitlin Johnstone's articles, usually by her co-writer Tim Foley.

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