It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times...
barely had one year ended,
than another began.
We smoked cigarets (sic),
coughing up phlegm, quit smoking
in order to see the sun rise fifty years hence,
and died of colon cancer in the evening.
We rose up against our oppressors,
only to find that we were both
the oppressor and the oppressed.
Small nips off the bottle gave us
warmth and chilled our souls,
waved away the fear of tomorrow
and ushered in the enemy while we lay sleeping.
We dreamt dreams of the past and the future,
while forgetting ourselves in the present.
We left secret messages to our future selves
and drunken screeds on the answering machines
of former lovers begging forgiveness
for our past lives, and in the end
we had only ourselves to blame,
to hold in contempt.
There were two paths before us:
the lonely road ahead
and the lonely road behind.
Each seemed lonely.
And in the middle of the night,
while so many lay sick or dying,
while so many found salvation
at the end of a rope, or a gun,
or a tailpipe, or the bottom of a bottle of pills,
or just the bottom of a bottle,
I awoke and realized all was vanity.
All the tyrsts, the drunken fumbling for genitalia,
the one-night stands, the wet pavement
in the morning of the day after,
the little arguments over scrambled eggs and toast,
the minor heartaches and hangovers
of some three hundred odd days
were really nothing more than childish tantrums
and a yearning to be young again.
All the petty disputes, the minor catastrophes,
even the weather formed only fading memories
of a year in passing: little more than grains of sand
in the hourglass of Time.
Only our laughter and mirth kept us alive
while the sun returned and Orion
crawled slowly across the sky
hunting the Future.
So we wake up to another decade
and decide to live more and fuller lives,
regardless of terrorists intent on blowing us up
and sending us to Allah,
or the intelligentsia who tell us how the world
is and what stocks to invest in.
We wake up to the first day of our lives
nearly ten years separated from 9/11,
from the rampant fear and loathing
of a xenophobic culture bent on repeating the past
and all of its mistakes and missteps,
stumbling towards the dustbin of Time.
Dinosaurs, anyone?
