Ten Seconds

to
comprehend
the unthinkable
to remember the face
of a person you have not
seen in ten years…to enjoy
the first smile of the day from
your child...to decide if a
statement is meant to be
sincere or ironic…for anyone
but Olympic-caliber athletes to run
100 yards…to understand a single
sentence written by Immanuel
Kant…to adequately brush your
teeth…to cycle through all your
cable channels without stopping
on any of them…to put in a pair
of contact lenses…to thread a new
pair of laces through your sneakers
to parallel park. to electrocute a prisoner
to toast a piece of bread…for a minimum
wage worker to earn two cents…to free a
CD from its infernal shrinkwrapped packaging
for an English major to calculate the area of a
circle with a nine inch radius…to check a book
out the library…for a computer to boot up…to
untangle your Christmas light cords…to burn
five calories…to take a pee…for a man and a
woman to create just one new perfectly ordinary human being

II
Ten
seconds
is
enough
time

to
terminate
the lives of over
fifteen-hundred human
beings…to eliminate from
existence a building over one-
thousand, three-hundred and sixty
feet high…to disintegrate over thirty-four
miles of steel…to turn into dust enough
concrete to build a road halfway from
New York City to Washington, DC…
to shatter over twenty-one thousand windows…
to flatten eight miles of staircases…
to stun Peter Jennings into utter silence…
to turn an obscure psychopath into an
internationally reviled villain as well as an
internationally revered hero…to forever
and personally alter the lives of more people than
can fit into the Superdome…to bury in rubble
over fifty-five million dollars in gold…to convince
Congress to pass a law that sacrifices tangible
freedoms for the illusion of security…to forever
vilify an entire religion in the eyes of untold generations
to take billions of dollars from programs that could better
the livelihoods of Americans and use them instead to finance
an unwinnable war declared on an abstract noun…to shake the world