POP 9/11
Like hundred-pound piranhas,
we bite pieces of day
with an eternally empty stomach.
We are brigades, and we are already extinct
before the light turns red.
Our queen Rush, with her long blue fins
and the yellow smile of an imaginary sun
flashing, newborn and just dead,
she laid her soft eggs under the skyscrapers
which continue to grow, up to pierce
the fucking fake sky, the aquarium lid.
Each of us has a golden phone
to speak at any time
with a psychoanalyst or a new god
but nobody hears the fat cries,
far and near, of the ambulances,
of the bombing across the pond
which whizzes through the alleys of TV news
aboard the psychedelic Janis Joplin’s porsche.
We are millions in this Coke Sea,
with the engine of boredom turned on
and commercial jingles in the ears.
As piranhas we bite thousands of images
without really seeing them:
A homeless man in his shorts, in the middle of the street
with his beard scorched by dementia,
is waving the Confederate flag
while Manhattan repeatedly dodges it
passing him next to seventy miles an hour.
At the same time
someone has a heart attack on Wall Street,
deflates his elegant double-breasted jacket
and from the sewn by hand pocket protrude
the brown head of a Cuban cigar
and a bags of cocaine.
Andy Warhol’s ghost
with a blue wig and tortoise sunglasses,
who understood the trick a long time ago,
continue to record the images
of the Empire State Building,
the greatest still life of all time,
without losing a grain, a leap
or a perfect pirouette
of Now which is dancing for everyone.
As piranhas we attack in groups,
we just need to smell the fresh meat;
Jezebel, the Phoenician princess
the high-priced whore with her red skirt
and a leash studded with amethysts
leaves her apartment carrying
a network full of fish, caudal fins, dollars,
and winks at the pimp on the corner
who’s counting the money
with a Lucky Strike in his mouth,
humming his rap,
just turning his head towards the rumble.
The plane, like a huge razor
cut the sky, chopping off the cable of the morning
making it fall on us, like thick rain
tons of Campbell tomato sauce
and the red fliers of what so far
had passed before our eyes
to die later, after the first corner
in the subway station
for an overdose of indifference
in front of a wall painted by Keith Haring
where he shows us all as men and women.