Ohashi's poem opens on a playground and turns it into a battlefield within a few lines. Children skip on "crash symbol leaves" (probably cymbal, though the spelling also lets "symbol" sneak in), and the dry autumn noise is already a kind of clanging. Then the poem turns on those same children, calling them "toothless fiends, lil parasites." The insult is half affectionate, half poisonous, and that mixture sets the tone. Home, work and childhood are all described in the language of an infestation.
The central idea is that violence has become so routine that nobody reacts to it. The first stanza stacks up its images without pausing: fathers coming home from "the slaughter factory," a "blue copper patrol buggy," "blood splattered suburb trees." Then it delivers the line that matters most: "and the scream, they scream, / but its just another day." The grammar stumbles over the repeated "scream" as if the speaker can't stop hearing it, while the sentence around it gives up and shrugs. The poem never says who is screaming or why, and that vagueness is part of its point. The noise has become background.
Ohashi's wordplay is where the poem is most inventive. "Passing off pieces of some fractured entity enemy called peace" makes peace into something broken and hostile, and the next line quietly echoes it: "please please scream the slowly wrinkling brains." "Peace" and "please" sound almost the same, so the plea and the thing pleaded for blur together. "Slowly wrinkling brains" turns aging into a weary, intimate image. "Concrete crossing across the traincrossing" is mostly sound, a clatter of repeated syllables that feels like the rhythm of a train passing. Even the police line, "trigger fingies as they like to say," uses a baby-talk diminutive for something lethal. That childish word, sitting beside the "slaughter factory," shows how casually the neighborhood talks about harm. The fathers' ambiguous "pleasure in the activities" does similar work, since we can't tell whether it refers to the killing, the job or something worse.
The second stanza changes the poem's method. The long, loose lines give way to a mechanical beat: "tick tick," "tick tock," "clink clank." These sounds suggest clocks, but also coins and chains, and they turn the poem's world into a machine that runs on repetition. People become "another statistic number filed," the workday happens in "dreadful boxes" (offices, houses, perhaps worse), and the exhausted are "the unretired surviving fodder." "Fodder" links back to the slaughter factory, so the workers are being processed much as the animals were. The rhymes tighten too. "Quick" echoes "tick," and "why," "by" and "dying" chime together. The poem sounds more orderly just as it describes a life with less and less freedom.
The speaker also changes. The first stanza watches from outside, in the third person. In the second, "you" arrives: "why you feel so close to gutter dying." The camera turns toward the reader, and the closing line, "oh but why oh why are all forces following you," sounds almost like a nursery rhyme collapsing into paranoia. It leaves the reader unsure whether the forces are real (police, bosses, money) or only felt. The poem doesn't settle this, and the uncertainty is the point. Living under constant pressure produces both the pressure and the fear of it.
The title, "2021-01-26: Untitled," is a date followed by a refusal to name the poem. That reads like a journal entry, a moment caught and filed without ceremony, which suits a poem about things being filed away. The poem itself gives us no other information about its speaker or occasion, and it doesn't need any. Its strength is how much it gets out of compression and sound. It's rough and slangy, and sometimes the images pile up faster than they can be sorted, but the roughness fits. It shows how a society can describe horror in a bored, singsong voice, and it asks what that voice costs the people using it.