I'm staring at that picture...
AGAIN...
Goddammit......
At...
Well...
The Falling Man...
The poster-boy for 9/11...
The collective sigh of a globe in shock...
Plummeting...
Squeezing the damn air...
Right out of my lungs...
Just like that day, really...
Fuck >>
The colors have never seemed so vivid..
Since...
Well...
The fragile nature of a race...
Marked for death...
By an enemy insidious...
And brutal-of-heart...
It's the bodies I remember...
Mainly...
So many of them...
Raining from the sky...
Bled into that one historical moment...
Into that graceful but terrifying dive...
By a lone marionette pirouetting through a crumbling-world...
Damn, sentimentality...
It creeps up on you...
Even gets the better of you...
Sometimes...
The collective sigh of a globe in distress...
Fallujah under attack...
Infa-red labyrinth...
Marine-Cam-Insurgent-Ocide...
Playstation games....
Us >> the complicit witness'....
60-Day-State-of-Emergency...
10,000 > 15,000 US and Iraqi troops...
Storm the stronghold...
Tanks pounding with death metal...
The roar of violence...
deafening...
ANNOUNCEMENT: PASSENGERS ON THE 5.35 TO PLYMOUTH LINE....
TRAIN DUE TO DEPART FROM PLATFORM 3...
A derailment later...
Bodies dragged through windows...
Through the jigsaw of debris...
Through a "Suicide-bid"....
Or something more sinister...
7 dead >> 150 injured...
Through the senselessness of a random-act...
The collective sigh of a People in distress...
For...
Yasir Arafat...
Bridge-builder...
Or destroyer...
>> defender to dictator>>
Depending on your persuasion...
In a state-of-comatose...
Politico-genics...
"Arafat's sheer genius at surviving has carried him as far as he can go, and even though the end of the line must be obvious to him, he has no intention of letting go. The illusion that he is Palestine and Palestine him stubbornly persists; so long as he is alive he will go on believing that, no matter what happens. The further difficulty is that all of his theoretical successors are lesser men and are likely to make matters worse..."
Edward W.Said >> From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap.
Mrs Arafat...
His guardian...
Protector of his assets...
EMOTIONAL >> SPIRITUAL >> FINANCIAL...
Purse-string-widow...
Whistleblower...
Executor at his Parisian bedside...
"You have to realize the size of the conspiracy...
I tell you, they are trying to bury Abu Ammar alive..."
"ACCESS DENIED," she roars...
To her husband's lieutenants...
Heir apparent...
Abbas...
In particular...
Yesterday Hamas...
Today Arafat...
AND STILL...
The Falling Man...
Reconciled with his Fate....
With ours...
The Palestinian crusade...
Gaza-strip-ghettos...
Caked in rivers of blood...
Small sacrifice...
For a patch of turf...
All...
A continuing memorial...
To WHATEVER lies ahead...
# transmission ends #
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
I don't think I fully comprehend the underlying political assertions of this one, K, but it doesn't much matter as it totally works as art
2 - kable>
Why thank you C...
This is merely 'accidental' retrospection...
Fragments...
Less borne of political ideology...
More of the senselessness of any one act or action...
K