What people have you been the proudest to make angry?

The newsmen finally accepted their role as microphones.

Only a politician could say, with complete earnestness, that he or she agrees with and generally supports the very people he or she has just dispatched armed riot police to attack and disperse by surprise in the middle of the night. Apparently the Occupy Wall Street bases were attempting to provide food and shelter, as well as libraries and involvement, to poor people who showed up. I guess it’s safer and more convenient to warehouse the poor far away from the discussion.

What is our one demand?

If you had a machine to record the images from your dreams, what do you think it would be like? The machine, the experience of replay, or both? Because we can do that now.

You can pick your leaders, you can choose the crowds you mingle in. And when they laugh and cheer at death, and righteously puff their chests at things that should cause us all shame, you can ask yourself what you are doing with them.

They say a fog came one summer and lasted ninety days. When it lifted, it took the colours from our irises, revealed a city that had been repainted grey and chipped. No one was left who was in love, but every debt was forgiven.

I took the ferry to Halifax once and the trip stole my memory. As I stood out on the deck and felt the spray cold on my face it felt like hands were reaching up out of the frigid choppy waters to unravel me like thread, leaving me salty and clear. Absolved.

Let us destroy the Martello Tower. Destroy it again and watch them build it back every year, growing more determined to catch us. Growing craftier, subtler, causing all our friendships to falter under the weight of mistrust and betrayals, until only you and I are left. We both know we are too few, and too poorly equipped to keep the rebellion going. We try anyway and are caught. The prosecutor demands that we hang, one before the other. Instead we escape, and drown in the attempt, swimming from the island fortress to a land we imagine but know nothing about, except that we know it is hopelessly far away.

I know where the tunnel entrances are, beneath the Citadel and the Signal Station. They are flooded and murky and icy. They are dangerous and perfect. If you can show me something better, then I am yours.

How badly did you want it to be true? Enough to live your whole life, doubting?

But no one counts the hours or the years. There are no seasons, the days are unchanging. Nothing dies out, nothing freezes over—not the mosquitos, not the refuse in the river beds. Everywhere we look we find the litter of surplus, the riot of vegetation, the overgrowth of humanity spilling out, as if God’s thermometer has snapped apart over the streets and its mercury dots are the motorcycles.

Five men sit under a sheet metal screen, quiet as a constellation. They are waiting. They are blank with waiting, waiting for anything to happen. The hours pass uncounted, their trivia falling into the gutters with the rest of it, with the wastes of humanity.

This peace is mystic, ancient and crushing. They say never to add music to what silence has said best, but this is a peace I want to shatter with a chord. And you—with you I want to rouse the street, not to prayer but to life. I want us to inspire the roofs to lift and the vines to tumble, the city to erupt like the volcanos that surround it, leaving gardens in the craters and love letters in the igneous pillars.

Tonight, love, I want us to gather up and organize. For tomorrow before dawn, we storm the mosques, we fill them and spill out of their grounds, and like a choir of thousands, we sing through their megaphones. Tomorrow we will make an instrument of them, the greatest ever built, the throat of Jakarta, a resonance that will rise into the sky and fall onto our heads, a celestial finger that, touching our foreheads, will lift us to our feet for sunrise.

Tell us about a crisis you lived out to the fullest.