The Second Day I Watched The News ((Essay Kinda)) Poem by Luke J. Holt

Most 10 year olds dont watch the morning news before school
the buzz of gobbling Froot Loops and slammin Sunny Delight as if it were the nectar of the golden sun itself contrasted sharply with matters of quarterly tax negotiations and recaps thereof.
The morning i decided to put on the first hemms of my proto-adolescent daddy-pants was that of September 10th 2001, was one that was likely not unlike any other broadcast at on Today in New York
i remember it being hokey, trivial,
((just one before the fires))
things about about cats doing compromising acrobatic feats, Matt Lauer inhaling Wolfgang Puck s latest anti-vascular creampuff queerbomb into his mouth, clearly avoiding the impulse to use his tie as a napkin.
im sure that Coldplay or some other joke was set to fill rockafellar plaza with chunky dustbowlers in tacky travel tees holding homemade manila paper banners louder than the screaming coat of any taxi.
the segments clean and mellow vectors from matters of sugar free soda to a rape-free America were comforting to me then. there was nothing ill at ease; not even greyness.
just happy morning people with happy yellow cups; waking up laughing and smiling together on T.V.each day giving our people their news and tasting trendy fagpuffs until the need to stifle a merkstorm of indigestion summons them mutually to the powder-room,
like those wives on T.V.
the ones who dont seem like they ve ever walked
only carried and fawned for and given glittery drinks and soft clothes and new faces for when their old ones get old

Beauty is the most organic cause of paralysis

I went to school at vaguely 7: 30 A.M. the next day
((missed it by minutes))
even before the the idyllic crystalline of that forecast was embossed into its mythology, i can remember also remarking on it then
the trees just beginning to die
and in their terminal husk they turned everything the sun touched to a lion s main
the sky was like a cartoon bath
drawn in a partition of tweeked-tint technicolor
the sun watched white and unobtrusive
a regal boiling blimp among the undaunted blue

ZOOM

I had never heard the word TERRORIST before
it sounded like the latest toy Mattel was trying to sell me, or a quixotically nefarious Batman villain. spare the streets of Gotham, i did not expect to see respected authority figures panicking over anything called terrorists anywhere
it should help to explain that the reason i got out of school almost immediately that day had very little to do with the fact that two 747 commercial passenger jets out of Logan International airport had collided with the north and south towers the World Trade Center. it was more attributed to entering what was now my second month of retentive constipation
my stomach felt like it was harboring a petrified fudge cake
the panic was scarce and at best stifled for the sake of the children. but people did begin to charge the school for their kin
like wild horses
as if the bombs were falling everywhere
a thin long haired brunette who always cried was cradled like an injured skier by here mother as i clenched the tenth of a calender year s worth of Oreos, Ellios pizza and high-octane gas station filth i had fermenting in the narrow virgin chasm of my boyish frame s gully
i got a ride home with Blaine in a Taxi, which i was amazed was yellow even in the suburbs
my first ride in a cab
on the sunniest day of my life
far from the pluming spires afar

for me school became a chore and a hassle very quickly. i reveled in excuses to bail (fever, vomiting, med related fallacies, half days, holidays)
school wasnt hard, it simply already felt like a rote experience
i went home and proceeded to activate my Nintendo 64 when, while switching between pre digital cable and my discontinued T.V. s manual auxiory function
I SAW IT
like a gunmetal tallboy crushed vertically in slow motion and with a macabre gown of grey ghoulishly tailing with a harem of fat dirty tufts of smoke. they billowed bestially as if from a stove ballistic with coals gratuitous. i could tell they couldnt/wouldnt show the collapse at a delayed speed to such exploits. that was actually how slow it crumbled
like an act of nature
volcano-like in it s grandeur
with a dreamish ambivalence
a sky bluer than the second you are born
clouds banned from vistas as if spared
excused and safely composed of the air that carries thin death past skyward eyes and bright nails over pretty faces red and twisted in a moist, shiny warning
the smoke like a new wing
perhaps the 13th, where the devil was seen
a hanging appendage undulating like the warm, chilli-scented chimney smoke of a cabin far from fear
like a pestilent glowstick reaching to heaven with a fistful of people who ran or couldnt jump or tried to help and got hot and ran out of space and got covered in dark and a papery blizzard flavored with your neighbor s city

Two things for me changed hense the cloudless morn of the burning cities
i finally took a sh! t
and the goofy little spazz i was i hummed a little tune from the game i turned on once the T.V. went from its iconic telescope to its auxilory mindhole
(Banjo Kazooi, i think)
and also the days of the news being about fluffy dogs and creamy treats was about as done as the sense of security that gave us room to consider such vapid morsels of inanity newsworthy at all

The news was war now
it was weeping people, forever sleeping people, bleeding and ashen and fleeing and burning people
it was hurricanes of dust
dry torrents of index and debris like that from your dad s ashtray
in a dull glitter of waltzing cinder behind a blue sheet of sky like fabric soap against the marring of anguished fog
the news was dry now; in deserts; with soldiers and helmets and lame-looking dudes in awesome orange silk kimonos getting their heads chopped off for taking a few snapshots
the news had wreckage
skeletal scaffolds of iron ruin, paneling in a windy, threadbare dangle from smoking steel girders. Gardens of ember and their blossoming curls patching the trembled mecha of Man s big project
perhaps my impulse to see the last broadcast of trite, lolly pre-9-11 morning news was that perhaps it was important to see just once, with my own happy yellow cup
the morning news at 7
just once as a child who wants to giggle at a water skiing squirrel
and maybe void his bowels