|
A week goes by. I cannot change my nightmares.
They’re beautiful, slow motion color movie replays.
It is a beautiful fall day. No clouds.
I’m seeing it on television, sleepy.
It’s dark outside. The screen is memory.
One time it’s from one side, one time another,
But always the same blossoming of red
And black, the way the wings were tilted up
For maximum cross section impact, planned…
The person who did this was very careful,
A carnivore that nips the hamstrings through
Then bites the throat away, grinning in blood.
The pattern is so natural, so cool
And calculated, the design of one
Who hunts, who waits until the prey is helpless,
Till nothing could be done to stop the knife,
The snare, the snapping trap, the well aimed arrow,
This giant bullet smashing its way in
To find the heart and break it, set it burning.
The nice thing about nightmares is the feeling
It isn’t real. This is not the first time.
The damage has been done. The sandcastles
Have crumbled one by one before my eyes
Before they do it this time. I attach
Strange meanings to the scenes, as if they were
Somehow about me, though I know they’re not.
The living ghosts, the people coated white
With poison dust, with lime, as if the killer
Were all too eager trying to bury them,
To put them all down with one maddened blow,
These ghosts are always running, running back
Into the darkness visible before them,
Seeking companions, strangers, lost in Hell.
I do not dream about the mourners. Them,
I cry for, weeping in my pillow, baby.
Go ahead. Try not to believe me.
And now the news is something I can’t hear.
It won’t sink in. They’re sending in the bombers.
They’re dropping food and death upon the mountains.
I see the Al Jazeera film clips rolling:
Bin Laden’s sad goat eyes, their emptiness--
He has enlisted the Americans,
Who either learn to hate him, in which case
He has the thing he wants, the right relation
Toward the schizoid object, stuffed with pain,
To justify the acts of Holy War;
Or else they don’t, but hunt him down,
And then he’s made them into what he says
They always were, his persecutors, truth
Molded to fit a paranoiac dream.
He doesn’t need to hate them: He must be
The victim of betrayal, infidels
Who never lost the faith they never had.
And that man in the White House, that poor fool,
He wants me to do something for him.
He’s drafting me to serve, to swallow sorrow
And vomit rage, when I still thirst for tears,
Although he won’t admit it openly:
It comes out as amazement anyone
Could hate the good old USA, its need
To be the favorite of ice cream lovers,
No matter how it has to disavow
Its leaders for their moral frailties,
Its history of blindness to itself
And its own history. Nobody knows
That there were draft riots for the Civil War
And that they took place on the Northern side,
And that the point of Sherman’s March was not,
As he burned everything down to the ground
Across sweet Georgia, which had once belonged
To Cherokees who tried assimilating
But were refused because the speculation
In real estate outweighed their human blood--
Let’s see now, it’s so deep, this irony,
It’s hard to keep your bearings. Ah, now, yes,
That Sherman’s point was not unlike bin Laden’s,
Except that he was on the winning side.
And there’s that silly man, whose father praised
The Taliban, the students, saying, “Free men
Respect you everywhere. Have some more weapons.”
He’s glad that I’ve forgotten the recession,
How there won’t be Social Security
For me or anyone my age or younger,
How all the happy yuppie dreams are gone
Like second-hand computers at the auction,
How I have joined the ranks without insurance
And how my sheepskins do not keep me warm,
Although I’ve left to Michigan its winters
And to the small Midwestern minds, their small
Midwestern thoughts and terrible cuisine.
I cannot change my nightmares--ot without
Some change in how our evolution works,
That beast lets the beasts that will be beasts
Inside us all collude without our knowing
To let things happen that we cannot stand,
Hoping we will release them, let their fury
Eat up our lives and never let us weep,
Not let us purge them from our blood in tears.
He wants me to get back to normal, somehow,
As if nothing had really changed at all,
Go off to Disney World, get on a plane,
Do not lose confidence in the mundane,
The below-average to which the pitch
Is always aimed by certain sorts of war kings
Who are afraid not just to lose the war
But to stop being war kings and be men
Who go to war as honest and wise men
Who will not have to have their lessons there.
He wants me to believe some things don’t change,
That business will be business, war be war,
And we will only have to cope with slight
Improvements, nothing really serious,
Though everything is always changing, now,
When everything has finally really changed.
©2001, Joe Aimone
Next page > “The Beautiful World in Ruins” by Steve Potter...
Poems After the Attack collection > table of contents
Previous Feature Articles
By Date | By Topic
|
