Sunday, September 11, 2011

redux: September 11, evolution of a day

2006
i
m
 age
 miss
 in
 g

2007



2008

Ladri di biciclette
(re: bicycles & towers, circles & thievery)

Aren't we all?

From the instant we take birth
until our last breath,
we steal one moment

after another

calling it our own,
trying to find our way home.

Wayward minds,
waiting wives,
and children's lonely eyes.

Lonely children's eyes
as they watch their fathers
abandon them on street corners
– for bicycles.

(the dharma can never be lost,
but neither can it be found)

It simply waits while
we run the Roman streets,
channeling Goths and Gauls,
watching movies on Wednesday nights
from the comfort of air-conditioned condos,
watching the rise and fall of post-war Empires
during election years.

Writing responses
to Italian neo-realism,
reminiscing about Luigi Galleani
on recommendation of beautiful Russians,
and looking for the Buddhahood in Mario Buda
seven years (to the day) since eighty-one years
after the first Wall Street attack.


2009

self-plagiarism and repetition along a vertical axis
(variation on "Ladri di biciclette")

From birth
to breath
we steal:

one moment.
one moment..
one moment...

calling it our own.

Children watch
fathers abandon
them for bicycles.

(the dharma
can never be lost
can never be found)

We channel Goths and Gauls
from the cinema-ed comfort of
condominiums, watching Empires fall

in post-election years.

Writing
variations
on responses to
Italian neo-realism,
no longer looking for
Buddhahood, Mario Buda.

Eight years since.
one moment since..
eighty-one years since...
one moment since....


2010

this morning i read:

"I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night—the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean."
Haruki Murakami

while drinking coffee in bed;

what happens when the sentence fails
to tether "her" back to the collaged
fantasy of Mardou in September 2007
or
the empty "her" i left the year before?
the intermittent, repetitive "her" of 2008
or
the composite "her" emergent the year after?

what about the "her" oblivious to
punctuation, beyond words and
seen only in the spaces between?

the
boundless
instability of
pronouns never
ceases to amaze
me, mimicking
the function
and folly of
memory
itself.


2011

10 
years, digits and superstition:
what is the value of silence
amidst
10,000
vows and proclamations
chiding us to remember
that
1
day in September
no one is capable of
forgetting
?

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