forced march pilgrimage to ameri-mecca

                    

Got driven to new york city

on a chilly wet sunday morning by

fitful sleeps and nightmarish daydreams

and an indescribably gnawing need to take in

some of the horrible and the holy aftermath and

aftershocks of the jihad guided missiles

parked in the twenties on the eastside

and walked down past hundreds of faces

desperately pasted on walls and fences

and  fixed on top of bodies in motion

moving to a quiet funereal beat 

that pounded a solemn silent march inside

so many minds distracted and distraught

while candles still flickered in the drizzle

and urgent messages began to run in inky rivulets down

pages posted  to find but left finally to honor

the forever lost.

Wandered through Union Square,

now fairly desolate

without the impromptu staging sites for

improvised memorials and silent vigils

now a sadly empty, rain slicked grimly grimy place

of passage to the lower depths of manhattan,

the “clean up” leaving  dirt embedded puddles of melted

wax, and scraps of paper stuck to where

tape still clung to fences and pavements...

And here and there a few fresh tracts of semi psychotic

ravings now hung to connect all holocausts and  denounce

all pacificisms and all the minds of the folks who sat damp

and determined

a few feet away behind a lonely wet table and offered soggy hand outs asking to give peace a chance.

And over and across the way, a few dozen

Western looking Indians stood stiffly awkward amidst

a few headshaved and facedaubed Hare Krishnas

dancing and swaying and singing entranced

whilst a Hindu orator exhorted an imaginary throng

bull horn blasting to hundreds more than stood before him,

saying something about standing together in the tragedy.

 

And the air changed quickly crossing 14th street.

Picked up strong wisps of smoke as I quickened my pace,

and walked more headlong down past

villagers and college students on Broadway through

almost normal new york bustle wondering how and where

and if these people carry on

or if the guy spinning his kid in the Cooper Union Cube

could smell the same smoke I was smelling

or if all the empty chic clothing stores round NYU were in

mourning this morning for the death of stylish decadence

or outlandish impudence or

the outrageous ostentatious and conspicuous

consumption for which the stylish corpse manniquins  beckoned

vapidly from their post modern shop windows as I bore

down ever more quickly and the rain fell even harder.

And crossing Houston, the air changed utterly

the soho/surburban/boho passersby suddenly and even 

surreptitiously seemed enveloped by the increasingly acrid

powdery stench that thickened the atmosphere in bitter

contamination constricting and coating passageways and

tightening eyes and mouths and drawing faces into taut

sad seriousness ever more gravely the further I marched

to the end of the island

and the streets became clogged with

newyorkstlyehumanity and lots of flag pins and scarves

and souvenir pictures and reverentially serious

Koreans selling symbols and mementos

and drawn faced cops and wooden sawhorses and

cameras and dust masks and painfully solemn faces and

softly speaking or mostly mute adults craning necks and

standing on tippy toes and bunching up and looking back

like Lot’s wife petrified in guilty morbid fascination while the

cops called out to keep on moving through the ashen

streets and the choking dust and i walked on

as the skyscraping mausoleums ringing the disaster

mouthlessly moaned  and stared down with empty dirty eyes

and people took color digital movies of a black and white

surreal landscape where all motion seemed frozen and

the steady rain could not wash away the smell of cremated

concrete and asbestos and humanity and plastic and

plaster and paper and electronics and metal and

innocence and arrogance and big and small business

and life as we used to know it.   

And I turned a corner  to dodge the crowd and turned

again and turned once more onto a dreamscaped side

street coated in desert moon dust with an old woman

disguised as an epiphany frozeframed in the middle

of the narrow street bent over a camera with a parenthesis

for a back taking a picture of herown epiphanous moment:

Framed in a doorway bordered on top by a sign that read

NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE stood a dust covered military

man still as a Buckingham Guard in a blizzard with a

carpenter’s dust mask on his whitened face and a statue’s resolve

And I finally stood transfixedly still watching the motionless

old photographer taking in the immovable sentinel at the

gate of the world’s trading temple which was not destroyed

in the fall of the towers but now looked like it stood on a

street in Kabul, Afghanistan

And I knew why they had made their forced march

pilgrimage to ameri-mecca to our temples of prosperity

doom and mass destruction and I breathed in how

and why it tasted so bitter and so bad

                                                            Paul Bukovec, 2001

                      

            message to the zealot                        that which you were so hell bent on destroying had already destroyed you.                                                                                                                

so Atta, how largely wretched

must we, the US, have had to loom

to you, winged jihad pilot

to justify this?

were we so depraved in our indifference

to muslim deprivation and outrage

were we such defilers

of your holy lands

such supporters

of the despots and

the colonialist israeli interlopers

to justify this? 

were we so hugely tall

so coldly arrogantly high

and defiantly mighty?

so autoerotically

cocksuredly wrong

standing so doubly erect,

monuments to mammon idolatry

and pornocorruption in

our homogenized sour cream 

barbequed pork culture,

our hollywood produced

and directed social  disorder,

and our women, exposed

and defiantly out of place,

and our indulged children

raving to ecstatic godless beats and 

our plenty of plenty of plenty

of nothing,

to justify this?

and in all your darkest black disgust

and your starkest white distain

for what and how we are

could you

in your burning vision

of redemptive disintegration

only obsessively  see

a passage to paradise and

dedicated virgins and not

a sentence

to that special ring of

damning searing hellfire

and eternally blistering ridicule

for those ignorant and foolish

enough to evoke the almighty

to exorcise satan

without the courage to

look within to find their own

demons lurking?

while you embraced

your kalishnikov on your lap

balanced your stinger on your shoulder 

practiced with your boxcutters

and aerial maneuvers

before the atrocity  

were you so

fundamentally

enamored of

those sacred sacraments

and rituals

of devastation

you could not

would not see that

in your shallow piety

you had become

and maybe always were

though studiously

and religiously disguised

simply but exactly

the very thing you hated?

and  that your throbbing

nightmares of

ragingroaringdesire

to destroy the enemy

were driven by

the same vile green passion

and shamefully

titilating

wet dreams for

things shiny and fleshy

and cold and cruel and

by the same crude

need for the power

to engender fear

and humiliating control

on your enemy that also

drives them ?

did our supreme

callousness  allow you

to murder with such

contemptuous

indifference to the

agony of the innocents?

is that how you justified this?

that godamnable hate

which you could see only

in our eyes

you refused to see

looking back at you

in the mirror of 

your own soul

so you force marched

to ameri-mecca with

simple minded clarity

with your loathing

lathered with lust

and primordial envy

with your partners drinking

in the strip bar

the night before the

apocalypse

and your mission was

always and everywhere

absolutely corrupted by 

your own demonic desire

for sadistic power

and tragic revenge

you blewback

and extinguished

the torch of righteousness

with your own fanatical fire

the grandiose deathangel

god's messenger and martyr

you were

already dead to this world

and to the next

because you were

oblivious to how

mothtoflame you had become

one with the oppressors

a devil among devils

in the zone of annihilation

a detonator

in the explosion and expansion

of evil within and without this world                             

Hamdallah?

no.

Amen.

Paul Bukovec, 10/01

         

Nightmarish Daydreams

then in a mind’s blink I'm

flashing on the plane passengers

or those trapped in the infernos;

or the jumpers;

or the firemen;

or the people on the cell phones or those

sucked and consumed by the vortex

of the imploding volcanoes

or those buried in the avalanches

of steelandglassandconcrete.

relive and redie many times many ways:

turning startled to face

the horrible

rushing  cacophony,

I am enveloped in a crimson

cloud of hellish flashblast

that vaporizes my

screaming thoughts

in an excruciating instant...

or I’m hurrying down crowded

smokeydark stairs

on musclecramped legs as a deafening

roar of fiery ruin

decends from above and quickly

quiets everything...

or I'm huddled paralyzed

in fear in the back

of a plane, unspeaking

dreadfully knowing but frozen 

and numbed by paralytic

terrible warmwetpants fright

as we collide headlong into

redwhitenoise

or I’m rushing with

tied T-shirt round my neck

in headlong attack on the darkeyed boxcutters

with a maniacal bloodviciousness of myown ...

or I leap in electric panic down past

shockingly swift passing stories with

wind billowing my shirt and the

sun briefly tingling my already singed neck skin

before I fly into the shadows

and am abrupted on the pavement...

or I’m saying good-bye to my wife

with a cell phone I've never had

and I’m so sorry that I can’t think of

anything else to say but that I’m so sorry...

or I never get to say good-bye to my daughter ...

I mumble something to her I cannot hear above the

deafening chaos that engulfs me...

or... I run shamelessly for my life

to body quivering spirit shivering safety

and I crumble in self loathing

for not saving somebody, anybody...

or I carry a very heavy black lady a very long

way and find out she's dead when we reach safety.

  

or I sleep fitfully and wake up tired and

I imagine the unimaginable all day

And I wish the bad dreams could be over.

                                           Paul Bukovec