The poem was inspired by a particular photo of the WT C, and after that by my first visit to the 9/11 Memorial.  On the day of 9/11, I was working about a diagonal mile away, and from our windows, we could see people jumping to their death.

Open sky annulled
to bordered lines of
uptown edges,
worldview momentarily
forcibly redefined by
memories of buildings and sadder days,
recollections of pillars of biblical smoke rising

A photograph
makes me look up,
and sit down historically,
need to catch a breath,
to rest mentally,
upon a storied small bridge's steps,
that I well recall,
a disappeared street stoop.
all were rubble then and once
upon that day.

Wear, tear, and older eyes distill perspective,
but the hardy heart is hardly stilled
by the recognizable gray upon
bon vivant gray reflective surfaces of
memories of buildings and sadder days

So today, on a reborn street,
I rest upon reconstituted speckled curbstone,
the city's lowered down ledges,
the city's lowered down-town boundaries,
constantly redrawn, but
nonetheless, always rebuilt from their own
regenerated stony compost,
and the NY passersby doesn't even notice
a man, head in hands,
silently weeping, thinking that:

We throw away so much we should have kept.
We keep so much we should have thrown away.

Lose keepsakes, but keep our mysterious sadnesses
locked away in compartments that open only to
benedictions uttered in ancient tongues.

Make your own list,
be your own curator,
catalogue visions of sophomoric triumphs,
museum mile pile
those early poetic drafts,
be unafraid of memories
raw and ungentrified,
overlaid, buried underneath
postmortem of dust-piles of senior critiques

Finally went downtown to see
where the blessed water falls
into catacomb pits that once
were the foundations
of buildings that ruled the cityscape,
downtown anchors
for a modern city that exists
only because it was built on
million year old granite bedrock

Stone monuments are stolid, discrete.
Memories are of grayed, frayed edge consistency.
Negatives resurrected that survive digitally,
all blend synthetically, layer upon layer,
essence distilled in a single,
black and white photograph
that serves to
disturb complacency,  
awaken stilled pain,
reflections suppressed,
are restored

If six were nine
And Jimi Hendrix a nun
Would nine be none
Null and nil ?
And if sixth were ninth
And Jimi Hendrix a ninja
Falling like a sun into the sea mountains
on Ninety-null street
The world famous Quatre-vingt-dix-nullième rue
Would you mind ? Would you mind ?
Would you mind if September stopped to exist
And all the dead of September came back from Null None or Nil
And Jimi Hendrix were seventy-six.

i feel the lonely bitterness of streetlights
slink away into the city

when I think of you,
home .

Attires of a closer regime,
Closed in on the muddling assets
of a light,
Flickering.
On a dead end street,
Through a meandering
There’s an eventful animus.
Past eleven,
P.M.
“To lobby is to redeem,
Apparently(!)
For I sin and repeatedly sin.”
Only by 1 and only through one
Single flock of wind-blown sediment,
man acknowledges life and
It’s dreadful stripe,
Laid upon a landscape;
Full of faux images of random schemes.
Well, there the ongoingness goes
Of moments that are no way chronologic
Where one plaster over another
Seems like a perfect match.
When the clock strikes to 3
A.M
Merely a sigh passes along,
Yet another minute,
On the cold street
The light knows no acuity at all.
It means for another tick,
Yet does not wait for the tock;
Tick-tock(!)
Tick-tock.
There lies 3 hour worth concurrence,
Confronted for each tock, for half a minute,
But only the seconds pass.
And with each skip that matters,
and only that matters nevertheless,
The clock goes back to
Eleven
P.M.
There(!) the gutter calls for another drink,
For another trace
On another strike.
However mournfully,
Escort of a humanly maze,
The muddling sort,
Births confusion.
The attires seem gone by now.
The heaves; quite impeccable,
The path adopts another protest,
For a much tackled breathing
Time overlaps,dreamily,
On a spectrum,
Laying as a single faceted imposture;
Mocking a postering of shed upon the pavement.
For another street that seemingly differs;
where the marching will always depend
(Regardless)
Solely on the counts of seconds
By the potency of motives
That merges as to defy
The years accounted
On the flesh and bone.
Now there goes another strike,
Audible over the plane
And
It carries on as
“To lobby is to redeem
For I sin
And sin
And sin
On a 3-hour worth strike,
Starting at 11
P.M,
Over another man’s bearing.”

saw:

the adoration of the daddy,
as his red haired babes
leaned into
either side of him,
courtiers to a king
on the way to school this AM,
transfusing his magical super~fatherly,
by inhaling his special powers through
their nostrils, direct from his
broad and powerful brave-heart chest,
for use later in the wild jungle
of second grade
•••
an elderly gent whose walker rattled
with every lift and kerplunk on
the street~steppes of a dangerous city
for the brittle of bone and the easily dentable,
and the crowd that gathered round walking
at precisely the same pace he required
to make it across the widest boulevard
which was thirty seconds more than the
Dept. of Transportation's asinine calculations
and a miracle from Lourdes occurred -
not one horn honked in ire as the court
escorted their Long Live the King
safely across the street, as if
idiocy was like rain, against the law,
until after sunset as in Camelot
•••
an elegant germanic man,
in homburg and velvet collared overcoat,
taking care of sales and distribution of
newspapers and candy at the corner paper "stand"
while the elderly owner, whose partner~wife of
fifty years had recently passed, now had no one
but someone's pop whose was out
walking our cocker spaniel,
to tend the place while said candyman
obeyed nature's callings

and all his fans and friends who passed
on their way to the adjacent subway station,
exclaimed Erwin, Erwin what are you doing?
his twinkled crinkled eyes replied,
enjoying their puzzlement, laughingly saying
"making spare change"
•••
where I lived these little miracles occurred so frequently,
was told a story that the ministering angels
could not keep up with their duties,
complaining to the On High, who resoundingly loudly
commanded their silence! by reminding them that
all these, his creatures, were his own precious,
the reason for creation and why they were needed,
and the sum of all these small acts gave them their own
existential purpose, now angry at himself for loss of temper,
soft spoke as a parent and told them better,
hush my children, we have much to do!
•••
so now you impatiently need to know
why this scripture
came to be known as
$$$$$
for I was witness to all of this,
all on that day,
that was twenty fours hours long
across many hard hearted Hiroshima decades,
that made me
temporarily
the richest man in the world

On city streets
late at night
in the cold winter
I walk
and run
not too numb
to feel
not too blind
to see
my dream
like a summer day
long gone now
only cold to crystallize my fate
like frost on the window
icy patterns
trying to get in
I reach
and pound my fist
against the wall
of humanity
of denial
stretching across the horizon
as far as I can see
I am lost in a crowd
only the sun
beating down
reminding me
I am hot, so hot
I'm going to die
on city streets
It won't be easy
remember me
I walk
and run
away
like a summer day
long gone now