Art/Proze

Let's not talk politics, please, let's light a candle tonight.
Altin Topi
Alb-Club
September 11, 2001

If we need to believe in something, why not believe in Heaven. I believe in Heaven, my Heaven - New York. Usually, my Heaven is a place where Islanders boys in fluorescent clothes play reggae, it is a place where cleaning guys as saints with portable vacuum tracks suck up the City's dust and garbage in preparation for tomorrow's tourists to help pay for so much needed gazillion-dollar. My Heaven is a place where somebody paints the front door hot pink and the exterior purple, to show off the orange trumpet roses, and we’d have laughed. My Heaven is a place where you can buy a Gucci loafer with the signature horse bit, a place where tourists from Europe would have been able from the tops of its scrapers to see the Pyrenees. New York, my Heaven, is a place where miracle seekers bring with them dreams of money offerings and in return they find a place to buy candies and teddy bears. My Heaven is a place where sometime the people are mostly black, sometimes mostly white, sometimes mostly Asian, sometimes mostly Hispanic, and sometimes the Citizen thinks about them as Others. But my true Heaven is a melting pot, you see a mixed black or white or Asian or Hispanic among those people. You see brown skin, epicanthic folds at the eyelids, wavy light brown hair. Often beautiful.


In my Heaven, there are thousands of would-be novelists, most of them lacking talent outright, a portion of them blessed with the inkling that they need assistance, e few of them affluent enough to pay someone, an editor, to raise the level of manuscripts toward a more presentable publishable work. Most of them think that they all have a chance. But the bottom line these days, thanks to personal computer, more people write books then read them. All this happen in this Heaven of many, my Heaven also. It is such a wonderful Heaven, because if you have talent and luck, which is the real blessing, the would-be novelist, the would-be rich, the would-be something can strike a chord with the Lord of this Heaven, and the magic can turn to be quite true.

But tonight my Heaven is a torn-down place. There are lots of people tonight carrying candles. Their eyes are accidents. The kind that do not happen every day. They are coming from everywhere, carrying candles like a burning orchard. Everything is on fire. They come; they open their mouth and say words: "Bye, we always love you". I step outside to take my own flaming place. All the faces have turned suddenly to stone, like all the marbles statues standing at the empty art museums.

Let's not talk politics please, let's light a candle tonight. If you hold your breath, you will see that everything and everyone tonight is grieving, singing a sad song loud enough, under brown and withered leaves clinging to the trees.

In the darkness of the earthy light, the candles, the night will let to feel safe. The vandals are dreaming, wolves are dreaming. The vandals dream their arms unseen, drawing blood. Do you feel safe? Lower your voice, soft, the vandals sleep. You and I must dream the vandals dream, because a word, can reveal, the dream and its meaning. Torn to life, soft your voice, we must dream the vandals dreaming, so our poem of life to begin as the vandals dream. Let's light a candle tonight. We need to believe in Heaven, I need to believe in my Heaven - New York.