Posted by Atticus on September 30, 2004, at 22:59:23
In reply to Re: poem ... Apocalypse Lips, posted by Jai Narayan on September 30, 2004, at 14:13:26
Hi Jai,
The phrase "And I'm puckered up to kiss/The apocalypse's lips" is just a metaphor that anthropromorphizes the hovering sense of imminent disaster that so many of us in Manhattan have just come to accept, yet also the duality of our thinking, where we shift mental gears from big worries to trivia and back again almost constantly. In this case, the first verse goes from Orange Alert and armageddon to Paris Hilton and the American League East division race and then back to the apocalyptic vision of imaginary nuclear mushroom clouds, which are ironically juxtaposed against today's blue sky.
Yes, the frosted Twin Tower cookies and tacky sidewalk vendors who peddle them are absolutely real, and have become something of a cause celebre among the papers, especially the tabloids. They're generally seen by natives such as myself as an example of just appalling insensitivity. Mostly, out-of-towners who treat the Ground Zero site as just one more tourist stop, like Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building, are the people buying them. To them, the whole thing was a reality television show; they don't understand what it meant to those of us who saw that monstrous cloud engulfing downtown.
I was at a meeting at work (my day starts at 8:30). A friend named Steven burst into the conference room and told us to lower the big screen projection TV. After a few minutes, most of us went outside to see the billowing cloud itself. We were well out of the danger zone, but I swear to God, it looked like a scene out of "Dante's Inferno", a circle of Hell viewed from a distance. We all started dialing our cell phones like lunatics, but with millions of other people in a 26-mile-long space doing the same thing, no one was getting through. When the South Tower did come down, we really couldn't grasp what we'd just seen. We had to go back into the conference room and check with the television to make sure our eyes weren't playing tricks. None of us could believe that something so titanic could come down in seconds. Anyway, three years later, this is where I (and many others) stand on the events that continue to shape our lives. My brother, who lives only a few blocks away from the UN, is constantly getting stopped and having to produce ID for cops to show that he lives in the area. (And he's dressed like the high-priced lawyer he is!) I can't imagine what they'd make of me, although I've gotten to his apartment without much trouble in the past. I think the difference is that he travels mostly above-ground, while I tend to favor the subways. Atticus
poster:Atticus
thread:397228
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