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.