The Last Dance

My world is burning....

The financial trail of the world
It pours out through the firestorm below
If falls and falls, snow in September with none of the purity
Down goes all of it, through the gaping maw of flame that was once..
that was once office space.

I can't follow the white trail, it leads to the inferno
I stand at the window, and though I see rescue below,
I know they will never succeed, there is no precedent.
I know this is the end.

From the end I think to the beginning...
I never danced.
It felt like my body didn't want it
I've lived my life to make my name.
My name in business, my name on mortgages,
My name written on bank statements and stock options.
My name on all these things...but
I never wrote my name on a heart.

I once made a start
But we drifted apart.
She knew what it was to dance,
I thought I knew better.

Now that it's here
Now that I am ended, and all that I wrote my name on is burning away.
Now perhaps at last I will live out my past.
My thought are out in the open air, and I follow them out the window.

I will away the world as it rushes past me.
It's not falling, I'm flying.
And for the first time I dance.
For the last time I dance.
I dance, because there is no ground to hold me.
No ground to hold me, no ground can.
I dance the last dance
and I am free.

The Last Dance is centered around World Trade Center attack on 9/11/2001. I recall one of the notable things about that attack being the huge amount of papers that were pouring out of the building, thousands upon thousands of pages related to the business that the WTC conducted. The picture below, and the stories of the poor people who jumped rather than perish in the fire beneath them in the building inspired the writing, however the main point of the thing is regret over a life wasted on "being somebody" as defined by how much money a person has made and what sort of corporate position they hold, rather than enjoying life while we have it, as symbolized by dancing. I used dancing because among human activities it is one that requires its participants to not think about what other people think of how they look at the time they are dancing, a release from social pressure, and also a means of not taking everything seriously all the time, which someone who spent their whole life, including high school, looking only towards getting a high paying job would have. Many aspects of our society would have most of the youth in America do this. The question that occupied my mind, or the main thought, was that in such an event, when everything that we have worked too hard to put our names on is burning away, what will most matter to us? Assume that the person in the piece took everything very seriously and worked very hard, and was successful; say he was the president of a successful business that had it's offices in the WTC. All the stationery with his name on it, all the paper indicators of his success, even the office itself has been destroyed, or will soon be destroyed, and he realizes that he never took the time to realize how important relating to other people is. He never dropped his single minded pursuit of financial success, and as a result, he never danced, never let go. Perhaps, in the final flight, or the last dance, he decided to dance or rather...to let go. because there is nothing more important. Sherwood Anderson devoted a whole chapter of his book Winesburg, Ohio to how important it is to LIVE the life that we get, rather than always looking on to something else, and setting out minds on "important" things, while failing to experience where we ARE.