The Nightclubs and Restaurant Reviews,
The Vacation Destinations,
Without the Word:
MECCA

The road to Mecca is dry
the mountains near Taif
angular, unforgiving.
Baboons scurry in front
of the car, begging for handouts -
most of them maimed in some way
hit by cars. In Oz, they could fly.

A dozen kilometers or so
from our destination we pass
under a giant concrete book
in awe of human ingenuity.
Hardened pages spread
over two gray lanes.


I wonder: Can I go here?
The signs warn of dangers
outside the Emerald City.
The wizard has concocted
and created a disturbing motto:
Infidels, those of us who don't believe
a highway sign might
sentence one to Hell for all eternity,
turn back at once.
Dorothy, go home.

I've got the green document
it says I can do this,
I won't be arrested.
I'm wearing these white sheets,
yet somehow I don't believe.
I doubt that Mecca knows my name.

Inside the rocky town
most people never see,
a Pizza Hut stands catercorner
to the prize. Over there,
a Five Star Hotel under construction.
The castle doors are all the same,
angels guarding every single direction.
We leave our plastic shoes
near the most conspicuous looking one and go in,
barefoot and murmuring in a thousand voices.

Seven times around the Kaaba,
we circle drenched in the sweat
of others, the crimes we all bear.
The malodorous throng contracts on one corner
hands reaching for a meteorite.

I the imposter
have stained my white clothes
with Arid Extra Dry,
I've got Hanes Her Way under these limpid sheets.

We run for water
we run like Hajar,
the Generous Stone.
We run seeking water,
decanted into plastic containers, from her well.

Zam Zam! Our shoes disappear,
picked up by a stranger.

Mecca for the unbelievers
this is where you go
to find yourself,
stone the devil himself
and why not?

Signs are only signs.

An Explanation of the word: Niggeritis

Some words cannot be spoken,
written, referred to, carried out,
plagiarized or otherwise utilized.
Simply put, we must discriminate.

I've got niggeritis.

Realizing this,
I appointed myself to the Nigger Watch.
A declaration was made,
I am the muslim Nigger,
I am watching you like you watch me,
watching you at the fountainheads
of language.

Please explain this niggeritis.

No problem I say, Constance wouldn't mind.
Constance with her big white teeth
and her big White name.
She and I have an understanding
about that sort of thing.

Niggeritis is a feeling.

"You've got what?"
I said that just as we stepped
gingerly over those concrete barriers
in a parking lot, those that slam
into car bumpers.

Niggeritis.

It was two o'clock, lunchtime.
It was hot. We'd been working hard,
well, hardly working in the ICU,
in our pure and white uniforms.
Some days are like that in a hospital.

Constance, where's your niggeritis when it's needed?

I felt so very white, so white
next to this African Canadian
with niggeritis,
so very ignorant from a colorless
redneck town. Where's the red?

Niggeritis comes from Africa.

She opened her big wide mouth,
the one that got her into trouble
most of the time, that one
with big white teeth and explained:

Niggeritis is nigger laziness.

Can I have it?
I'd like some of that.
In the end though,
I found out I can't have niggeritis
unless I am a nigger.

So I declared,
in light of being an Islamofascist
in some people's eyes,
in their carelessly chosen rhetoric,
to be a new kind of nigger.
So now I can say nigger,
as much as I want.
People generally don't like it,
but you know,
we niggers don't care.