A Fortnight of Years - 20150908

September eleventh approaching fourteen years like two weeks of media inundation

Recycled zombie dust storm metropolis desert fumigating the haughty scale

Of Tom Wolfe’s bonfire decadence and Ayn Rand’s innovation towering like an anti-Mecca

I did not know what Wahhabism was, Al Qaida, or the rancor of a paper tiger unfolding

Wet-eared to corporate America rescaling with Enron pissing puppy yellow squirt shit

On the newspapers in the Arthur Andersen kennel I was twenty-two breathing in the miasma

The epoch of airplanes whirling hijacked kamikaze in the Pearl Harbor of my generation

I still believed in Jesus

The rebarbative zeitgeist slung jingoism to the airwaves

Conspiracy theories and panicky church-house drunks fizzy-lifting drinks

For glass elevators and ceilings busted like an asbestos piñata of innards and lawn-mowerish ash

Rictus reactions to popcorn screen crawls munching a guess how many kernels in the bag death-count

Old Testament wrath and Muhammad mutton retribution to the Shepard

Stupporous like a prolonged epileptic fit into year fourteen still misunderstanding Pakistan 

I go back to a peristaltic moment in the guts of women and men peering busted windows

From high enough to know there will still be some thinking between the release of feet and the ground

The squeamish debate of burning alive and leaping suicide

I think of the faithful, the legally bound against self-murder

As if god was watching promising an eternity of burning if one elected to forgo

An interminable enfilade of minutes to scorch dermis engulfed in flame for the jet-fueled air launch into the New York sky         

What must it take for a human being to decide, “This is the better option.”

I imagine the true fear is not the ground, but the falling, the vulnerable knowing you are falling absent Parachute or remediation, but to close eyes or stare the concrete and open the maw to bite rock

The truly damned are the indecisive; those debating jump or burn and suffered both

Tumbling in charring bombardier frying in some god’s holy chrism

Faith like an anchor to paradise or perdition guided the acrobatics of the day