The Lazy Literati

Gracias! You are too kind :)

5:00AM in Sleepyhollow and my eyes are open, soaking in the bleach-stained sky Light seeping through rosebush lashes, tangled in thorny restlessness as our great cantaloupe, the womb of Today, dangles along the strings of the horizon, balancing above our colony, wondering why She walks her tightrope so diligently only to be greeted by the tired eyes of a silent audience, waiting for an escape from the dark?

"From wonder into wonder existence opens." - Laozi

“I was a bit of diva in my day, does that amuse you?” Your spirit a corpulent cloud, the fetid perfume that stalks so many of our mornings lately. Cheeks like deflated balloons, Experience has rubbed out the tip of your eraser, left your dermis defenseless, creased like the tips of your tennis shoes.  “It’s supposed to be, Time is a practical joker.” Your stare is soft, a squishy smile, skin pinched in doughy heaps around those sagging balloons cupping their last breath, wilted lungs flooded by the murky ponds pouring all that history down your face.

My guts, my blackest blues whittled to the marrow (what attracts all the dogs) Frozen lakes through forest fingers, the absent space between nightmare and consciousness: These are my gifts to you No candy hearts or billboards needed. In this certainty I show you my bones so you see I have nothing to hide.

“Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world, the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” We sit in shock and breathe deep like uncaged animals. Images of cracked, melting steel and fire and debris permeate my memory and displace me momentarily. I think back on barefoot workers migrating through Manhattan, blisters bubbling up on pedicured feet, lungs filled with smoke and ash and death. Sitting in a classroom with a skyline view I see them collapse: Two twins, born and raised in a city that never sleeps suddenly euthanized, as if God’s finger came down from the heavens to flatten New York’s apex, permanently altering the balance of our worldview. “God Bless America” cracks me from my memory and I watch as crowds of Americans, drunk and proud, fill my television screen and celebrate the news. “Celebrate,” as if death is something to be happy for, and yet I am not sad. I’m not happy, but I’m not sad and I’m a bit relieved, but as men and women chant cheers of happiness in death all I can think about is birth and rebirth. Bin Laden was born in 1957 and he was not a monster or a “jihadist” but a boy, a boy who held his mother’s hand when he crossed the street, played games with his siblings, and somewhere between the ages this man, the man Navy Seals eliminated, was created; not born, but made, built up from war drums and the screams of Arab children shuffled about their land, orphaned by weapons made in the U.S.A., searching for water but finding nothing but sand and sadness. We are not innocent. We speak of justice like an equation, balancing virtues and factoring out cultural variables but some numbers don’t add up here. 919,967 deaths, $1,188,263,000,000, thousands of injured and deceased American soldiers even more Iraqi citizens, non-combatants, over 200 drone attacks in Pakistan - all of these figures cannot add up to one. I don’t want to say he didn’t deserve it, I don’t want to say that his death was wrong, but two shots to the head will never be equal to the almost 3,000 lives lost the day New York's heart broke. After, my town was filled with smoke for days and standing against the Hudson, a 12 year old girl, soaking in the fractured skyline, taking her first volatile steps into womanhood, I found myself stuck on the same question I ask myself in this moment: Now what? I’m afraid I still don’t know the answer to that question, and I doubt I ever will, but the one thing I do know is that the answer lies not in destruction alone.