September 11th, 2021
a busy day at the graveyard
on the green hill not far from the bay.
hired cars shiver on the sloped drive.
a looming fall strokes the fingers of the trees.
stone-etchers, photographers, loafers in the grass--
a generation reminded that It Cannot Remember
What It Was Like Before is here to toe
across the clipped lawns, searching
for those remnants of the past,
rocks resurfaced by the passing rain.
there is now something we call late capitalism,
in actuality, another interest payment,
another restructure for credit backed by deconstructed bodies,
debt-engines to feed the bellies of ships now waiting
for their place in the docks.
look at them, sea-rusted on the water,
empty containers stacked like undiagnosed tumors.
they remain there, & we remain here,
behind the lens of heat
above the anxious highway.
the cemetery gates stay open
past dusk. we wander, fingers aged
by touch-collected moss.
there is a bench, a place to be, for now.
twin sweetgums frame the place
where twenty years before
two towers owned the sky.
nearby, a thin rise of marble
marks where colonizers failed
to halt the march of other colonizers.
then, a flashlight's golden voice:
time to go,
back into the city, another Saturday
for dollars to change hands
as easy as summer loyalty.
if there's a lesson here,
it's held between two souls in defiance
of the order to depart,
chit-chat of tomorrow,
the 12th, as gunless guards approach.
I make for the gates; I've been taught to leave.
as was the truth last year,
now this, until the next:
this poem will accomplish nothing.