STUCK
On the evening of 9/11,
Erich was behind a cash register in a retail store
while a nearby TV played the footage
over
& over
& over.
Two years later, spending well-invested income,
he walked into a bodega near Times Square
and found 9/11 t-shirts, key fobs, posters
hats and collectable glassware.
The guy saw him looking and asked:
"Where were you that day?"
Erich stared down the single security camera,
recognized the chance to turn and get out,
but right there in his face stood a row
of China’s finest WTC commemorative shot glasses.
And suddenly a Derek Jeter replica Louisville slugger
found his hands like every model ever used
to settle ballgames and barfights;
it wiped the shelves so perfectly clean
Erich had to pause and admire its power.
Then the rainbow of glass and plastic resumed,
the bat doing its job perfectly, until he dropped it
where one of New York’s finest
would bag it as People’s Exhibit A.
He knew better than this,
but having money does strange things
to a person’s sense of right and wrong,
especially those who know that
the key to identifying real revolution
is not in its glorious battlefield victories
but many small, sincere rejections.
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