Not for the faint of heart
EvilToasterElf
Posts: 1,119
This is a series of 6 poems about an event that I will never be able to shake but that I thank poetry for helping me get through
September 11, 2001
When I was told to turn on the TV,
the first thing I saw was black smoke
billowing from the North Tower.
It is the first time I have ever felt
all of my senses heighten
attune themselves to a single object
and my mind blanket itself in
black numbness.
My hands did not fidget,
and no words emerged from the
crevices of my subconscious,
to plume like the fires that burst
from shattered windows.
I was distantly aware of screams
and curses kneading themselves
into the blank walls of the rooms
around me.
When I began to thaw with the realization
that my building, the South Tower
was unscathed
the second plane hit.
College life was beginning to set in,
but I knew that my life began at this
moment and I would meet it
in the position I found myself in.
Helpless,
and on my knees.
Severed Elevator
I rise from my bed as the coffin
of night slowly raises its lid
The sun always hit the windshield
dead on for five minutes of the
drive to the train station.
I park far from the platform,
because the 6:50 is the third
train of the day.
Michael Asher, Jeremy’s father,
also took the 6:50 train.
also worked in the World Trade Center.
We sat together and talked or
slept through the ride to work.
He spoke to me one morning about abandoned
mines he had explored with his girlfriend in California,
their shafts filled with cold water and the debris
of miner’s lives. That girlfriend became a wife,
that wife a mother of two.
He worked in the north tower, I in the south.
We departed at the foundations of rock and
steel to go to our separate elevators.
We met again occasionally on the
ride home, we talked of our jobs and
our love of hiking and steaks.
Two weeks after my summer job had ended
I stare at a TV, when I flip the channels the
smoke and fire follow me.
I call Jeremy’s cell phone,
because his father’s tower was hit first.
The answer to my question is the one hundred and first,
For a company called Cantor Fitzgerald.
The girlfriend is now a widow, and the phone
falls from my hand when a small piece of metal
is replayed in slow motion
crashing into my office.
Funeral for a Friend
A week later we are at Adam’s funeral.
His wife is besieged by breast cancer,
the growth that will not stop
swallows her complexion and
her smile.
It is here I meet the friends and coworkers
who are left, and embrace each one
to prove they are still alive.
Adam also made it out of the building,
his was one of the few bodies recovered,
crushed under the rubble
outside the front door.
The casket is closed.
At the end of the service music is playing.
A voice that everyone in the room recognized
but would never grace the airwaves.
It is Adam’s voice, in the band he led before
the business world stole him away.
His words slowly tear down all the walls the
crowd had erected, all the breakers erode
before the squall of those songs.
There is a dinner after the storm subsides
At some point I notice my father is not at the table
I walk awkwardly outside, to take a break
from the intensity of dinner eulogies.
I see him by the car, his face is flushed.
I have never hugged anyone as hard as I hug him then.
It is the first time I have ever seen my father cry.
To Those Who Fell From the 84th Floor
I lie in bed rolling over to each side, staring from wall to ceiling
unable to blink
or conjure up any empty space
Because I am afraid
Not the usual fear of the wounds of flesh,
fear of what is known
The simple act of blinking floods my sight with faces
A new one every blink, every second of darkness is someone
who burned or fell
With every blink, and every face, an eternity flashes forward and I
Can’t keep up
The same people who shared Chinese food and cubicles make me afraid to
Close my eyes
I lie awake with the lamps on,
but there is no comfort in white walls and dark windows
I am restless, waiting for unfulfilled tears while denying they will help
I am sweating
The memorials are short, but empty caskets fall nightly into the void of my eyelids
The sun appears through the half drawn blinds
I pull off my covers as if they were the death mask of some decaying pharaoh
I don’t know how to live anymore
With the knowledge that so many lives have gone unfinished
August, 2004
For a while it was hard to take the ferry
past those two holes in the sky.
I was convinced that the downtown smog
would avoid that patch of air,
A memory that exists
like the clarity of immediate space
around black cars that drive through the night fog.
And now I take the subway,
like walking through a cemetery blindfolded.
The train buckles as if driven on rails of shame and corpses
The concrete hole in the city shivers
it is the womb of modern history
A dream played out on the eyes of a coma patient
Footsteps echo through the nearby office buildings
who have for the first time seen the sun.
What is a fit tribute to its ghosts who stumble in the dust of public records?
Any park, any place of forget and remembrance calculatingly mixed
serve only as a wilted bouquet in the terminal wing
a reminder of life for that fleeting moment
between a memory of a dead relative
and a drop of moisture pressed from the brain to the
ducts behind the eye.
All around those concrete stumps
are the carrion and vultures of tragedy
Tiny Strings
I am at my most vulnerable
falling asleep.
When memories drift like mist over a graveyard,
filling the black closets of thought with
colors and figures I can imagine, but cannot see.
I remember watching a bus burn.
During a clear afternoon in October
I saw one of London’s famed double-deckers
stop in the street
with black smoke rising from its engine.
I saw people scurry out in waves
like rain water from a gutter.
Flames followed the smoke
and I was so awestruck, that it didn’t occur
even if I’d had a phone, to call for help.
The bright red paint darkens on the bottom
and fire fills the windows at the top of the bus
A brightly glowing tumor on Tottenham Court Road.
All of the emergency training that life affords
shimmers between eye blinks and vanishes
somewhat like the stories of dead farmers who
capture the fury of tornados in their camcorders
before their homes are sucked into the maelstrom.
I think perhaps we cannot blame those who strive
for destruction.
Who consume themselves in explosion
Maybe we who are to blame
Didn’t we create government to shelter us
from the beauty of panic?
How long is it since we forgot that the world is sewn
with the strings of spider’s silk?
If you got through it all, thanks for reading it.
ETE
September 11, 2001
When I was told to turn on the TV,
the first thing I saw was black smoke
billowing from the North Tower.
It is the first time I have ever felt
all of my senses heighten
attune themselves to a single object
and my mind blanket itself in
black numbness.
My hands did not fidget,
and no words emerged from the
crevices of my subconscious,
to plume like the fires that burst
from shattered windows.
I was distantly aware of screams
and curses kneading themselves
into the blank walls of the rooms
around me.
When I began to thaw with the realization
that my building, the South Tower
was unscathed
the second plane hit.
College life was beginning to set in,
but I knew that my life began at this
moment and I would meet it
in the position I found myself in.
Helpless,
and on my knees.
Severed Elevator
I rise from my bed as the coffin
of night slowly raises its lid
The sun always hit the windshield
dead on for five minutes of the
drive to the train station.
I park far from the platform,
because the 6:50 is the third
train of the day.
Michael Asher, Jeremy’s father,
also took the 6:50 train.
also worked in the World Trade Center.
We sat together and talked or
slept through the ride to work.
He spoke to me one morning about abandoned
mines he had explored with his girlfriend in California,
their shafts filled with cold water and the debris
of miner’s lives. That girlfriend became a wife,
that wife a mother of two.
He worked in the north tower, I in the south.
We departed at the foundations of rock and
steel to go to our separate elevators.
We met again occasionally on the
ride home, we talked of our jobs and
our love of hiking and steaks.
Two weeks after my summer job had ended
I stare at a TV, when I flip the channels the
smoke and fire follow me.
I call Jeremy’s cell phone,
because his father’s tower was hit first.
The answer to my question is the one hundred and first,
For a company called Cantor Fitzgerald.
The girlfriend is now a widow, and the phone
falls from my hand when a small piece of metal
is replayed in slow motion
crashing into my office.
Funeral for a Friend
A week later we are at Adam’s funeral.
His wife is besieged by breast cancer,
the growth that will not stop
swallows her complexion and
her smile.
It is here I meet the friends and coworkers
who are left, and embrace each one
to prove they are still alive.
Adam also made it out of the building,
his was one of the few bodies recovered,
crushed under the rubble
outside the front door.
The casket is closed.
At the end of the service music is playing.
A voice that everyone in the room recognized
but would never grace the airwaves.
It is Adam’s voice, in the band he led before
the business world stole him away.
His words slowly tear down all the walls the
crowd had erected, all the breakers erode
before the squall of those songs.
There is a dinner after the storm subsides
At some point I notice my father is not at the table
I walk awkwardly outside, to take a break
from the intensity of dinner eulogies.
I see him by the car, his face is flushed.
I have never hugged anyone as hard as I hug him then.
It is the first time I have ever seen my father cry.
To Those Who Fell From the 84th Floor
I lie in bed rolling over to each side, staring from wall to ceiling
unable to blink
or conjure up any empty space
Because I am afraid
Not the usual fear of the wounds of flesh,
fear of what is known
The simple act of blinking floods my sight with faces
A new one every blink, every second of darkness is someone
who burned or fell
With every blink, and every face, an eternity flashes forward and I
Can’t keep up
The same people who shared Chinese food and cubicles make me afraid to
Close my eyes
I lie awake with the lamps on,
but there is no comfort in white walls and dark windows
I am restless, waiting for unfulfilled tears while denying they will help
I am sweating
The memorials are short, but empty caskets fall nightly into the void of my eyelids
The sun appears through the half drawn blinds
I pull off my covers as if they were the death mask of some decaying pharaoh
I don’t know how to live anymore
With the knowledge that so many lives have gone unfinished
August, 2004
For a while it was hard to take the ferry
past those two holes in the sky.
I was convinced that the downtown smog
would avoid that patch of air,
A memory that exists
like the clarity of immediate space
around black cars that drive through the night fog.
And now I take the subway,
like walking through a cemetery blindfolded.
The train buckles as if driven on rails of shame and corpses
The concrete hole in the city shivers
it is the womb of modern history
A dream played out on the eyes of a coma patient
Footsteps echo through the nearby office buildings
who have for the first time seen the sun.
What is a fit tribute to its ghosts who stumble in the dust of public records?
Any park, any place of forget and remembrance calculatingly mixed
serve only as a wilted bouquet in the terminal wing
a reminder of life for that fleeting moment
between a memory of a dead relative
and a drop of moisture pressed from the brain to the
ducts behind the eye.
All around those concrete stumps
are the carrion and vultures of tragedy
Tiny Strings
I am at my most vulnerable
falling asleep.
When memories drift like mist over a graveyard,
filling the black closets of thought with
colors and figures I can imagine, but cannot see.
I remember watching a bus burn.
During a clear afternoon in October
I saw one of London’s famed double-deckers
stop in the street
with black smoke rising from its engine.
I saw people scurry out in waves
like rain water from a gutter.
Flames followed the smoke
and I was so awestruck, that it didn’t occur
even if I’d had a phone, to call for help.
The bright red paint darkens on the bottom
and fire fills the windows at the top of the bus
A brightly glowing tumor on Tottenham Court Road.
All of the emergency training that life affords
shimmers between eye blinks and vanishes
somewhat like the stories of dead farmers who
capture the fury of tornados in their camcorders
before their homes are sucked into the maelstrom.
I think perhaps we cannot blame those who strive
for destruction.
Who consume themselves in explosion
Maybe we who are to blame
Didn’t we create government to shelter us
from the beauty of panic?
How long is it since we forgot that the world is sewn
with the strings of spider’s silk?
If you got through it all, thanks for reading it.
ETE
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
Fine work, ETE.
Your words regarding this make mine pale as detatched, smug, and childish. The simplicity of loss you portray is more tragic than anything I could conjur myself, especially when all I could conjur was a bunch of in-turned anger and spit.
Better than any news show interview, that's for certain. I have a friend who should read these... I think her attitude toward the even would benefit from such a personal rendition.