The Magnum Agency

It made us high and blue, the stills of skylines decimated,
Or perhaps it was the dust that covered us in grey,
Breathed in and out in the fatigue of that strange commute,
That made this a bleak and fractured dream of unreality,

While the vertical order of man collapsed to empty chaos,
The ragged, fractal edge of a planet built from nothing,
Returning to nothing, a leaden void made through madness,
In the dark sections of a brain cauterised with the rhetoric

Of blank-eyed preachers, sympathetic to no child, to no one
But the dead as tally, crosses painted on the nosecones,
Of holy-bombers fuelled by distant, mountain commanders,
The delusions of religious wars hiding thoughts of influence,

To replace a tolerated hegemony with the untested thoughts,
Of a colour-blind, adolescent mind set hard on everything,
They retro-fitted the planes with sirens, a wail of terror,
Foreshadowing a-thousand counterfeit assaults on collateral,

The blasted concrete is the memory of those hundred minutes,
The falling white material, from flesh to foam to fabric,
An undocumented weather, a million secrets in the wind,
A day’s work for three thousand people given up and lost,

And untouched, we magnify each real loss from its quiet end,
To the squared and cubed sum of so many gone at once,
Hiding the famines and droughts that take so many more,
Behind the skull of piracy and concentrated madness,

Bringing down belief while trying to prove it dominates.