"Self Evident," by Ani DiFranco

Yes, us people are just poems. We're 90% metaphor with a leanness of meaning approaching hyper-distillation. And once upon a time, we were moonshine rushing down the throat of a giraffe. Yes, rushing down the long hall, despite what the p.a. announcement says. Yes, rushing down the long hall, down the long stairs in a building so tall that it will always be there. It’s part of a pair, there on the bow of Noah's ark, the most prestigious couple just kickin’ back, parked against a perfectly blue sky on a morning beatific in its Indian summer breeze, on the day that America fell to its knees after strutting around for a century without saying thank you or please.

And the shock was subsonic, and the smoke was deafening between the setup and the punch line, because we were all on time for work that day. We all boarded that plane for to fly, and then while the fires were raging, we all climbed up on the window sill and then we all held hands and jumped into the sky. And every borough looked up when it heard the first blast, and then every dumb action movie was summarily surpassed, and the exodus uptown by foot and motorcar looked more like war than anything I've seen so far, so far, so far, so far…so fierce and ingenious, a poetic specter so far gone that every jackass newscaster was struck dumb and stumbling over, “Oh my God!” and “This is unbelievable!” and on and on.

And I’ll tell you what, while we're at it, you can keep the Pentagon, you can keep the propaganda, you can keep each and every TV that's been trying to convince me to participate in some prep school punk's plan to perpetuate retribution. Perpetuate retribution, even as the blue toxic smoke of our lesson in retribution is still hanging in the air. And there's ash on our shoes, and there's ash in our hair, and there's a fine silt on every mantle from Hell's Kitchen to Brooklyn, and the streets are full of stories, sudden twists and near misses, and soon every open bar is crammed to the rafters with tales of narrowly averted disasters, and the whiskey is flowing like never before, as all over the country folks just shake their heads and pour.

So here's a toast to all the folks that live in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, El Salvador. Here’s a toast to all the folks living on the Pine Ridge reservation, under the stone-cold gaze of Mount Rushmore. Here's a toast to all those nurses and doctors who daily provide women with a choice, who stand down a threat the size of Oklahoma City, just to listen to a young woman's voice. Here's a toast to all those folks on death row right now, awaiting the executioner's guillotine, who are shackled there with dread and can only escape into their heads to find peace in the form of a dream. Peace in the form of a dream. Peace in the form of a dream.

Because, take away our Playstations, and we are a third-world nation under the thumb of some blue-blood royal son who stole the oval office and that phony election. I mean, it don't take a weatherman to look around and see the weather. Jeb said he'd deliver Florida, folks, and boy, did he ever. And we hold these truths to be self evident: #1 George W. Bush is not President; #2 America is not a true democracy; #3 The media is not fooling me. Because I am a poem heeding hyper-distillation. I’ve got no room for a lie so verbose. Yes, I'm looking out over my whole human family, and I'm raising my glass in a toast. Here's to our last drink of fossil fuels.

May we vow to get off of this sauce. Shoo away the swarms of commuter planes and find that train ticket we lost. Because once upon a time the line followed the river and peeked into all the back yards, and the laundry was waving, and the graffiti was teasing us from brick walls and bridges. We were rolling over ridges, through valleys, under stars. I dream of touring like Duke Ellington in my own railroad car. I dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches in a grand station aglow with grace and then standing out on the platform and feeling the air on my face. Give back the night its distant whistle, give the darkness back its soul, give the big oil companies the finger, finally, and relearn how to rock-n-roll. Yes, the lessons are all around us and the truth is waiting there. It's time to pick through the rubble, clean the streets, and clear the air. Get our government to pull its big dick out of the sand of someone else's desert, put it back in its pants, and quit the hypocritical chants of “freedom forever”. Because, when one lone phone rang in Two Thousand and One, at ten after nine, on nine-one-one, which is the number we all called when that lone phone rang right off the wall, right off our desk and down the long hall, down the long stairs in a building so tall that the whole world turned just to watch it fall.

While we're at it, remember the first time around? The bomb, the Ryder truck, the parking garage, the princess that didn't even feel the pea? Remember joking around in our apartment on Avenue D, “Can you imagine how many paper coffee cups would have to change their design following a fantastical reversal of the New York skyline?” It was a joke at the time, and that was just a few years ago, so let the record show that the FBI was all over that case, that the plot was obvious and in everybody's face. And scoping that scene religiously, the CIA (or is it KGB?) committing countless crimes against humanity with this kind of eventuality as its excuse for abuse after expensive abuse, and they didn't have a clue.

Look, another window to see through, way up here on the 104th floor. Look, another key, another door, 10% literal, 90% metaphor. 3,000 some poems disguised as people on an almost too perfect day must be more than pawns in some asshole's passion play. So now it's your job and it's my job to make it that way, to make sure they didn't die in vain. Shhh, baby, listen, hear the train?

Labels: 9/11