25 years and it plays like yesterday,
Burned in so deep it never fades away.
Driving into work with the morning crew on air,
Two loud voices cracking jokes without a care.
The laughing stopped. The voice went flat and low.
They said a plane hit the tower and nobody seemed to know.

Within the hour, the second tower. Hard to take in,
We were still waiting for the punchline to begin.
Soon the Pentagon was burning. Nobody knew how many more.
We could not grasp what the rest of the day had in store.

You got home that night and the screen kept rolling through,
Watching on repeat until the mind accepted it was true.
Every plane was grounded and the sky above went bare,
Thousands on the floors of terminals everywhere.
All we did for days was try to comprehend,
And the fire in the pile burned on without an end.

2,977 gone that day,
Two towers, the Pentagon, and a field where 93 lay.
The firefighters going up while everyone came down,
Each of them a name in somebody’s hometown.
And later they assured us that the air was safe to breathe.
The ones who cleared that rubble are still dying of disease.
We never knew their faces and we never learned their names,
But every September we remember just the same.

So we started asking.

Building 7, no plane, it never took a hit,
47 stories, and at five twenty it quit.
They said it was not free fall till they had to admit it was.
Two point two five seconds and they never said because.

The BBC reported it before it even fell.
Still standing right behind her. How’d they know? They never tell.
Fraud investigation files and a CIA back door.
Every record in that building gone forever more.

We are still asking.

Molten metal in the basement weeks after the fall,
And they never ran a test for residue at all.
The steel that held the answer went to smelters overseas,
Less than one percent was kept. Case closed with that ease.
5 men with a camera on a rooftop in the dark,
Detained, then deported, and it never left a mark.

We are still asking.

Broadcast early on the air!
It was standing right back there!
Every record every file!
GONE BEFORE THE FIRST DENIAL!

These are not our words.
The Commission said it plainly. We were set up to fail.
One of them resigned before the report was finished.
This investigation is now compromised.
John Farmer built the timeline himself. Then he wrote this:
At some level of the government, at some point in time,
a decision was made not to tell the truth.
Not our words. Theirs.

Bush stood before the Congress nine days after the fall,
And named a war on terror that would never end at all.
420 to 1, and 98 to zero.
They gave him the power and the papers called him hero.

Afghanistan by October, then Iraq was in the frame,
20 years of flag-draped coffins and nobody took the blame.
One woman voted no and they threatened her for it,
That authorization still stands today. They never did repeal it.

45 days later and the Patriot Act was passed,
342 pages, and nobody made it to the last.
They search your house in secret and delay the day you know,
Your calls, your texts, your data, everywhere you go.
They sold the whole thing as safety while the freedom slipped away,
And the temporary measure is still standing here today.

We do not want a theory. We want what they will never show:
The steel beams and the tapes and the truth that we are owed.
They buried every answer so the citizen could not breach,
And called our grief conspiracy, and our questions had no reach.

Open the archive. Every page and every reel.
We will not let this go until the whole thing is revealed.
They shipped it to the smelters and sealed the rest from sight,
And they know exactly why it never came to light.

We will be asking forever.

25 years.
Two wars. Two decades. A law that never expired.
And a record that will never be opened.
Remember the day.
Then remember what they did after it.