Spitball Army

I am an unprotected wound, sliced
with the hurt, the sting, the pain
of others. Is that a tear? Yes.
I hear the cries in the dusty air,
I hear cries echoing in the ruins.
I hear cries and I weep, without control, without shame.

– Thomas Flynn

It was my intention to not post today. Unlike the last few years past, this year, on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, I feel keenly aware of those events.  I felt the need to be quiet.

The air here is heavy with moisture, and it is hot. The neighborhood is very quiet.  Are we all tuned in to the same wavelength?

On my way up to the office this morning, I noticed a new nest of wasps under the stairs on the side of the garage. After checking the mail and scribbling down my to-do list, I rode to the hardware store to get some wasp-and-hornet spray, in preparation for my own terrorist attack on the insect marauders.  The solemnity of the day caused me to pause, however, before I decided to destroy the nest.

On the way home, I heard Robin Young of NPR’s Here and Now interviewing Thomas Flynn, a CBS writer and producer. Flynn was at his Manhattan apartment on the day the planes hit. He jumped on his bicycle and headed straight to the scene, arriving in the area as thousands were fleeing. With a journalist’s eye, he observed the horrific unfolding of events. He ducked for cover as the dust and debris clouds extended from the site, and was nearly suffocated and buried inside of a parking garage, Vesuvius-style. Flynn, fortunate, eventually made his way from the site.

This year, seven years later, Flynn published his experiences from that day as a prose poem called Bikeman. It is interesting that a journalist, instead of writing his observations of that day in a traditional journalistic way, chose to communicate the wonder and horror of his experience in a literary style akin to Dante’s Inferno. In his interview with Robin Young, Flynn mentions that it was, in fact, his recent reading of Inferno that was the catalyst for this literary creation.

Dark, profound it was, and cloudy, so that though I fixed my sight on the bottom I did not discern anything there.

– Dante Alighieri

I will read Bikeman on 9/12.