Broad Street in Lower Manhattan

Culture, Economy, Education, Justice, Media, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen, Uncategorized, War and Politics

“The idea that people can then ride in on the subway with a bomb or whatever and come straight up in an elevator is awful to me,” said Claudia Ward, who lives in 15 Broad Street and was among a group of neighbors who denounced the plan at a recent meeting of the local community board. “It’s too easy for someone to slip through. And I just don’t want my family and my neighbors to be the collateral on that.”

-“In New Proposed Subway Elevators, Some See a Terrorism Risk

Let me tell you about the very rich.
They hate their children and live in glass towers.
The simplest pleasures are beyond their meager powers
of imagination; mostly, they like to bitch
about the minor incursions of normal life, the itch
of unsanctioned human contact, the fleeting sour
stench of the breathing millions they’ll rush to shower
off in their marble hangars. A muddy ditch
or a modest home appear as misery
defined; they do fear violence of a certain kind,
not terrorism, but a reborn Terror
without the killing—like, meeting the delivery
boy, or paying cash, or waiting in line.
Mere human contact is their Robespierre.

2 thoughts on “Broad Street in Lower Manhattan

  1. I can imagine a torture in Dis (fuck you spell check) wherein the woman in the NYT article is trapped in her home, by fear, with the News of the World occasionally blaring from various devices (terror terror terror) while the rest of the time, your humble narrator ioz reads this poem to her from the inside of her sealed panic room.

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