VOICES FROM THE DUST CLOUD
(9/11/2001)
by
Paul Sohar
Nobody
wants to hear any more about it,
it’s as if a passenger jet had
flown in one ear
and out the other. It’s all in bad taste.
And nobody wants to talk about it…
except that the tongue falls out, dangling like a
loose girder
beam knocking against crumbling chunks of words…
And all this after having been trained to admire
Dali’s melting watches?
So what’s wrong with an aluminum plane
melting into a
glass-and-steel tower?
Into a tourist’s image of Manhattan? a cheap souvenir?
And anyway,
it was only an illusion,
special effects, wasn’t
it?
Those towers weren’t real in the first place, they
were fake!
just
something to put into French movies
with a Manhattan locale like the
Eiffel Tower is thrown
into every
Hollywood film taking place in Paris.
They were just an emblem, and a cheap one too, so who
cares?
But if you still
must get sick over it, call it
God’s punishment on a sinful
people,
chickens coming
home to roost, and all the rest.
Hang a guilt trip over it and you won’t see it any
longer.
It was the
fault of everyone around you, wasn’t it?
So why should you care? Because it is September the
eleventh,
two
thousand and one?
Performance art that’s proving Manhattan to be unreal,
a mere fantasy, a capitalist
trick…
It didn’t happen, I don’t want to talk about it,
let’s change the
subject,
and if it did happen it didn’t happen to us,
it happened to Morgan
Stanley and the Lehman Brothers,
not to us. And they had it coming to them, but not us.
Maybe some
of us. But not you and me;
what did we do wrong? I cannot talk about it.
Pockets of jet fuel are still smoldering in my
stomach.
Maybe it
was my fault.
Maybe it was
something I ate last night.