On the seventieth anniversary *

of my untimely birth I reflect on
those poor "White Trash",
ghetto "Negroes", homeless Hispanics,
Filipina slaves, and others of the
Necessary Underclass
who died in squalor, pain and misery
on the eleventh of September
in the two thousand and first year
of the "Christian Era" (or Papal Caliphate)
- and whose deaths were hardly noticed by
a heartless, mechanistic
jingoistic nation-state.

(* today)