september 11, by default

The head fireman took his crew to one side and rubbed his brow with paradoxes of melancholy vigour. Everybody could smell the flames but somehow it seemed better to await instruction. A group of the elderly pressurized, this geriatric think tank, that vintage lobbyists. It was terror alive in its incomprehensibility, it was two dark cocks driven into the unguarded asshole of the West that made them, it was NYC. They sang it in quavering voice, “The day the fire chief lost his mind”.

The inferno continued to rage, an awesome spectacle of exploding glass and melting agonizing skin, and the foundation crumbled like yesterdays digestives into a greased and non-stick baking case for later consumption. This metaphor and others much like it drafted by otherwise speechless writers for the benefit of a British audience, a coital media explosion.

An interview with an executive was ceased.

“What happened to my city?” Drunk, reckless, dangerous for sure, he was smote by a policeman too trigger zany for street order. His whole life had waited for this and by rights he should have waited for formal heavy discipline, but everyone got a medal that day. When a landmark collapses the need for public violence grows, particularly in uniform.

Today is 9/11.

All eyes are on the firemen. How this terrible Christian assault might have occurred is really hard toffee left behind. The question now is pride? and deaths must be had for all of us in all of our names all civilized names.

Even the screaming and the traffic horns had become a silence. People hurled themselves into or out of the stupidest places, were broken up, were lost like children.

This is not an ordinary day not today.

The head fireman loosens the collar of his protective heat resistant jacket.

Another body falls down and lands what would be comically if the circumstances were different.

A choir of men all looking upwards towards the heavens are flattened by a bus. Pancake.

Nervous eyes bustle, and so crashes another shopping bag that strikes hard, and gravely remembers one dozen busted eggs that will never see the base of a good frying pan.

Something will have to give here but not the mayor, safe wrapped in blankets and wrapped tight a mile beneath the surface, with pre-recorded messages transmitted to good dummies. What is a mayor but a character?

There is a booth set up where you can blame for a buck, organized by some enterprising ex-journalist who will feature his own fortune by weeks end and champagne for one on silver platters.

But it is the firemen who have to watch a commander puke out and try to splutter past the regurgitate that there is nothing he can do.

Neither now,

Nor ever,

Nor at all.

“If I am a national treasure then please God make me a box.”

God, good God, loving God.

It’s always the Muslims. Like a new national motto.

Amidst the death and somehow isolated from it two small car fires burn and the thick smell of the tyres brings something unsavoury to the back of his throat.

September 11th, by default.