don't want to open up the wounds that never heal

New Yorkers always delineated themselves from everyone else, and even that day, boundaries were drawn. But I took it personally anyway, I ingested it.

Wake up. A voice insisted I wake up. A voice said nothing was certain anymore except for the moment. The moment was everything- it was acute and precious and fleeting. The luxury of resignation was gone, no more time for giving up.

The revolution would never come. Everything large was suspect. It was the detail that was beautiful; the heroes were the everymen. The sweeping gestures were empty rhetoric; small moves meant everything.

That is what I take from it now, that is how I remember it now. But when the wounds were still raw, when everything had collapsed, when I was young enough still to try to write in verse, some time in 2002, this is how I felt:

A building collapses to rubble
All our certainties are buried now
all that we believed has buckled
and tonight it would seem
I never knew you at all

A building collapses to rubble
We've come to think of it
as a matter of course
things fall apart
it's scientific
Why did we ever fight entropy?
Why does anyone ever?

A building collapses to rubble
Everyone takes note
but we are destroyed every day
our foundations crack
and we let it happen-
hidden in the debris,
broken by betrayal,
desperately clinging to
some reality, where it's okay
that buildings collapse to rubble

To steal yet another line: I know it's wrong, but what should I do?