The Eulogy of a Thousand Ransoms

"When we are marching in the mud and cold
And when my pack seems more than I can hold" - Lili Marlene

"See how God is punishing you."  The smirk on his face must have frightened the other passengers, they must have moved over a bit to distance themselves from an energy none of them recognized as Satan.  The Evil Whisperer.  The commandeer of remorselessness.  Satan sat back and closed his eyes, chuckling to himself, as cheerful as could be as the bus ambled through the curfew colored darkness. As the viral count mounted one after another assault on the pious ones as much as those guilty of far greater things than murder, he could be seen back near the sullen little toddlers resting their heads on their mommie's laps, shaking his head over the ignorance of people, the impersonal nature of his God, the same God who created all these poor dumb human beings.  These runners from the fire scared of their own shadows.  

It was probably raining as he climbed onto one of the buses taking passengers out of the city, past the strewn-about bodies too dangerous to collect, through the dark coal soaked air of Montserrat  County.  It is the kind of rain that turns on and off without warning, a person can almost drown standing up in that kind of downpour, the downpours of West Africa that bring hurricanes to New Orleans.  She could not hear other voices in the background nor was she really interested in what they might be saying or not saying.  She knew who was on that bus down to the last demon.

Most likely the mood on the bus was as grim as it was on the bus she had taken from the airport in Nicosia to the detention center on the fair grounds on the other side of Cyprus during that onslaught in '06.  Ten days of heavy shelling had left her in an excited state of pure exhaustion in which sleep matters very little.  Sleep in that state requires too much energy.  He wasn't there, he didn't bother to call even though the cell phones and electricity were 24/7 the entire time.  Even though his own children were in the line of fire.  As she looked out the window of the unmarked bus heading out of Nicosia, she felt as if she was being herded like a goat to the slaughter, no idea where the bus might be taking her and her children if anywhere at all.  Regardless of not knowing where she was headed, she knew why.  It was a fact:  souls belong to the sender, to the originator, to the director.  Not to those bodies that drag the souls around day after day.  Those souls all return to the manufacturer one day.  Those souls are all on a trajectory whether they know it or not.  Of that she was certain, Cyprus was absolute proof.

She knew for certain he failed to understand the nature of his emigration now in '13, seven years later, knew he refused to comprehend that the battle was on for his soul, not his body.  He feared Ebola, not hell.  Last time they were together he'd said, "I cannot believe what you believe."  Her mouth fell open and she had remained silent.  It wouldn't do any good to warn him again.  He'd gone completely AWOL.

Indeed, perhaps God was punishing her for being so gullible when he'd suddenly turn on her during a long distance chat and call her stupid, remind her of how useless she had become.  As he mocked her by pretending to lose a tooth knowing full well that she had just lost her third and he'd not had a cavity in his entire life, he managed to look so terrified one might imagine he'd been diagnosed with an incurable disease.  He looked into the camera and covered his mouth, his forehead wrinkled into some kind of agonal death graph.  She nearly wept over his loss, knowing as she did how important his appearance was to him until he started laughing and revealed his intact incisor.  She had just shrugged it off as a bad joke.  As she always did, using humor to cover up the fact he was incapable of understanding other human beings, she hadn't considered yet the possibility he was now in a state of possession, not his own.  It was far worse than that and for that mistake born perhaps of exhaustion or worse, laziness, perhaps then God was punishing her for not stepping in a bit sooner by divorcing him long ago, perhaps when she woke up after a drunken suicide attempt, her second and found he had placed a baseball bat by her head.  But now it was God stepping in as he had done for her several years before when she'd tried to murder her own soul.  She knew all about the machinations of this mysterious war with the devil.  She'd survived not just a suicide attempt, she'd survived intact and burning with a desire to get full disclosure.  From God.  Who obliged her on a need to know basis rather than the want to know way most people believe it ought to be.  She just never thought she'd have to write a battle plan.  Never knew she'd be sitting in the position of gunner, thought she'd just be down in a trench dodging shrapnel with the knowledge that Armageddon was now on, full throttle.  For a few fleeting moments now and then, she almost wished she'd never been made privy to this outrageous contention for the human soul.  Very fleeting moments, regrettable ones at that.

Now though, she was too busy screaming to notice anything but her own noise, her face pressed against the laminate flooring as the pain inside of her chest blended with the excruciating struggle to yell louder than he could whisper in an attempt to wrest control back from her delusional captor thousands of miles away.  She'd been hit and hit in the vital organs.  Somewhere in her mind she believed that the louder she screamed, the greater the chance might be that he would just stop whispering into the phone, trying to dismantle her resolve to preserve whatever sanity she had left, stop her hemorrhage and restrain his mad ability to wreak havoc in her soul with just a look let alone with six words murmured with the intensity of an AK 47.  Into an electronic device.  In another hemisphere.  The world of the unseen.  Mouth to satellite to ear.  Enter through the eye of a needle, it is easier.  And the bleeding just continues for hours and days.  It's the Space Age now.

All she could do was scream and all she could scream was "Stop! Shut up! Stop! Motherfucker!"  Over and over until at last she lay quietly, exhausted and sweating from the writhing about on the floor.  She had already lost 25 pounds in 2 months, nothing tasted like it should and even if it did, she'd refuse it to stay at fighting weight, lithe enough to carry her own pack and his, light enough to avoid the landmines if she could.   She was in the midst of war.  She'd been there already for long enough to know the difference between a mere battle and Armageddon.  There is no time for food, there is only sustenance there on that field, enough to get through to the next break of day, the next night raid and hostage taking.  Somewhere in that bunker she realized she had the ransom.  It was enough to get both of them to enough safety to stop for a bit and reconnoiter the troops.   

Her friends would show up unannounced to drag her out to one or the other restaurants in town and finally they stopped coming at all, a certain element of victim blaming in their tone of voice the last time she would politely decline their final offers .  Her only appetite now was for information, for clues, for proof, things of monetary value, black market things.  She was also fatigued from explaining the complexity of events to each and every person around her, tired of trying to convince them that she knew where she was headed.  All they could see was the eye wall of a hurricane and through good intentions urged her to evacuate.  Seek a divorce, give up, we know what's best for you.

Thirty five years of marriage and slowly all of it was beginning to make sense.  If only it was the type of sense which made one feel that type of pure joy one must feel when their disease is cured rather than the agony they must feel on the day their CT shows a large tumor just to the left of their nipple, but the base of it is rooted in the lung, it is inoperable.  Regardless of knowing she was right about the email one of his girlfriends had sent, "you were crazy last night, did you make it home alright?"  Regardless of knowing that and the rest of it or at least the parts God had revealed to her, she still felt as if tangled and bound at the ankles and wrist, screaming through the rags in her mouth saturated with saliva and the metal taste of blood pooling in her lower lip.  She'd made one little mistake.  One unfortunate accusation that was clerical in nature rather than substantial. The email was real, it meant what it meant, he'd been out on the town with the lady from the bank.  The one who kept sending him messages on LinkdN.  Confronted with that, he scanned the message and of course, since the name was wrong, he had grounds for pulling out all the stops, grounds for another attempted assassination, no baseball bat required as he had learned from the whisperer, one need not use violence in the netherworld when six words will do.

She'd attributed the email to an elderly Catholic woman, the head of a charitable group working for USAID, instead of the actual sender.  The sender was actually just another poverty stricken mistress of which there must have been at least four or five, perhaps more.  It wasn't her fault, there were so many names and things to go through and she'd mixed up the names.  She had piles of bank statements next to her computer in the guest room.  The stack of paper was such that if the door sucked closed suddenly from a draft, they'd slip off the desk like platelets forming enormous clots of white on the floor, one after another drifting through the air.  She'd pick them up each time, scouring them as she did and find one more cash withdrawal from a bank machine near a casino on the reservation in Tucson.  She'd mark it with one of the yellow highlighters and replace all of it into chronological order once again.  The time line would expand another month or two, January 2009 to March 2009 and on to this afternoon, "..see how God is punishing you?"

Perhaps God was punishing her as she shut the front door and watched the officers check in using their radios at their car out front.  They ran her in the system, cautioned her to change her address at the DMV, saw there were no outstanding tickets or warrants, no protection orders and handed her driver's license back, their faces a combination of pity and seriousness. They must have seen it all in their jobs.  From dead cows out on 92 to meth addicts holding guns to their head up at one of the dumpsters on American Avenue a mile away from her home.  Her neighbors were all on board, she'd warned them one by one that things might not be normal at her house for a while.  She'd told Janice of course.  Told her the marriage might be over.  The old woman across the street was trying to quit smoking but would call her up to bum a cigarette now and then.  It was nice to have a neighbor who for the price of a Pall Mall would listen to her laments for a half hour.  Janice advised her to get a boyfriend.  Standard advice from those not privy to the real issue at hand, the End Times things.  Those of us that know Armageddon gets us all.

This afternoon however, a gardener from another town had been trimming the grass across the street at Janice's house.  He alerted the police and feared for the inmates of the house across the street, he feared for her and whoever else might be screaming but he couldn't decipher the message.  He could not have known that the perpetrator was thousands of miles away on a bus running for his own life during the Ebola outbreak, on that bus down a few seats from Satan who was cheering him on, chuckling and goading him to more outrageous taunts than the ones before, each blow more daring than the last.  Poor Janice must have discussed it with her hired man and knowing as she did from personal experience, suicide can and should be prevented but it was likely she didn't want to betray her friend's confidence so she went along with the emergency call.  She knew the woman across the street was all alone but "common" sense got the best of her. Janice's husband had put a gun to his head over a quarter of a century before but it might as well have been yesterday, or the day her son did the same thing a decade later.  Janice lived with regrets and didn't need more of those so she let the gardener use the land line to call in a civil disturbance.

After the door closed and the police drove away, she dropped to her knees and just wept. Her old dog was outside hiding in the garage.  He looked as if he hadn't been fed for days however that wasn't the case.  He just couldn't eat either.  When he died some years later she buried him on High Lonesome and returned in a few weeks to collect whatever bones she could find.  The ordeal had taken years off of his life, Ebola kills dogs when it can and as she dug his shallow grave, her captor who had become her captive stood near coercing her to finish as quickly as possible, as if this death did not matter.  Stood there sinning as he was wont to continue to do and this she knew, and this agreed to.  There was no option in the matter.  Afterall, she understood the machinations of this war.  She understood the ransom of souls, the value of captives, the unseen bargains and treaties.  She had purchased the lease on his soul using the five swears, she just omitted her signature on the fifth after he had signed on his.  She didn't purchase it knowing she had done so, she only refrained from cursing him out of fear for her own soul, that much is for certain.  She knew he was as clueless about that as he was about the old dog's bones, as clueless about the sign he related back then.  He'd been in his shop on Gurley Street just down a bit from Sinkor when a man fell face first onto the sidewalk, infected to the gills with Ebola, dead before he hit the ground.  No one would remove the body for hours and hours and he must have felt more than a little uncomfortable thinking that God had him in the cross hairs by then.

Sometimes she felt she'd signed a contract with the devil by forgiving him, by taking him back.  She knew he was incurable, she knew he was blind but she'd had a dream long ago.  Fortunately she had written it down and for whatever reason, it turned up on the battlefield as if God himself had tended to it all those years lest it be forgotten.  In the dream, his mother had come to her and offered her $20 to go pick up her son on the other side of town, a place known as the Ouzai.  She knew exactly what the money was for when she reviewed the document so many years later, she just didn't know if it would be enough to get them both through that dismal last battlefield.  She mentioned it to his mother who was aware of her son's deviance from the path she'd taught him about herself and his mother agreed.  His mother was asking her to purchase her son's ransom in the dream, to rescue not just one of the fallen, not just a compatriot cut down by friendly fire.  She was asking to rescue a traitor.

When she collected the dog's bones she took her grandsons with her as if to insure that one day if she ever had to relate to them the importance of it all, she could remind them of her vow to bring the dog home, even if it was just one tooth or a single vertebrae.  Remind them to leave not one man behind in enemy territory, not one faithful animal either.  Nor their corpses.  To teach them about the sanctity of their vows and the ravages of their abuses.  To caution them with some real firepower.  It would be enough proof for them to know it wasn't just another one of her crazy old recollections, those stories she'd tell them about her days in the prison or the time she belted a Syrian in the gut with a walking stick.  She might let them see into the dark world of the gaslight, the prison tunnels she knew so well, explain it to prove God to them if she ever had to.  And although she knew she would never would do that unless they were in danger of becoming lost themselves, she would never do it to harm anyone even him.  She'd keep his secret if it meant these boys might recall the old man when they meet him in heaven.  All children deserve that much of an investment.  That ransom gave her just enough leverage for the never-ending tenure of being a jailer with a captive, just enough leverage to keep enough ammunition in the barrel lest he tries to jump ship again.  Just enough ammo to get off a few warning shots in his direction if need be.

Those bones.  She'd hold them in her hand and see that dog standing out in the rain, fearful of her screams.  Fearful of the demon that was trying to collect her too.  Wise dog.  Brown.  His ancestors in the Cave calling out to him in his sleep.

It was as if all those artifacts might somehow be used to build the ark she needed to get through the rest of her earthly life, to carry a few souls alongside her if she could manage to stay boarded herself.  Sails made of bank statements, oars made of femurs, the windful whispers of souls and saints and shaitans churning up the waves as the faithful stand on deck holding on for dear life, grandmother at the helm.  It's a rudder not a wheel she says to herself.  It steers in a contradictory manner.

Sailing on this sea of memory, hand to helm, the memory of near drowning in her own sweat on the floor while Janice bit her cheek and fought the urge to join her own men long since gone, to pull her own trigger, she'd pray to live only long enough to arm these little boys if she could, these youngsters out with her robbing graves. She prayed to die before she'd ever have to see them succumb to the machinations of the war mongerer, the slave driver, the hell-bent bothers of the accursed one whose sentence has always been hell while ours is only yet death while we live.  To live long enough to show them that fear is the devil's doing, in the shadow of the valley of death, fear no evil.  The Good Bible says without showing one how to load a cannon, how to escape the darkness of ignorance, how to ransom a soul.  It's all just alot of talk to little boys.

Lightning flashed on the horizon as the intrusion of innumerable battering memories poured down on her decks interspersed with a few clear days here and there.  At times she feared the next storm, at others she waxed nostalgic over battles won.  Death nears without exception, Armageddon gets us all.  Even her and if she could, she'd sit beside them at her grave and remind them to wash their faces, change their socks.  She'd whisper to them, I loved him anyway.  I had to.  You'd not have been here at my grave had I not given in to all that charm he used on those ladies.  He charmed me as he charmed them.  She'd whisper, I love you both too.  She'd whisper, I love your wives even though you have none.  I want you all.

Love she thought, love is not what the rest of them think afterall.  Love is the battle, love is the leading of the troops home, love starts on a mattress and ends in the grave.  Love is the thousand ransoms you hold onto, hoping against hope you won't spend them in this life frivolously on romance and all of its trappings or waste them on the gamble, later is always too late in roulette.  The gambler pushes his chair away only when his pocket turns up empty.  All our days are numbered but the receipt is in the safe.  It isn't collateral.   

Love, love thy neighbor.  Love thy spouse.  Love everything and fight to keep it whole.  Love is better than Love.  She'll tell those two boys with regret in her voice that it's better to save than to spend and how she'd hoped to never have to.  Either one.  She'll tell those two boys, carry on.  At ease.

-the pragmatic guest at all of the weddings since records of hurricanes were kept

Ars investigation what works now
tons of nonsense pushed down
a throat pipe so why try
to make it up the way they do,
taking that old Sra. with a stuffed chicken
pretending she was on a bus
down in the Andes.  She is as real
as her chicken just in case
the evaluation turns up signaling the empty.

Add a few words in Spanish
mention some type of date rape
plead for change, borrow a few blankets
to set up the refugee center
why don't you?  Some old woman
in NYC shall don her coat of arms
acerbically so, pinching her own nose
while she scribbles a few throwbacks.
Sure, it's a democracy, speed of light
is the constable, subpoena in hand.

This isn't happening, it's already
happened just in the future
so write it down in case
the world forgets all that ESP:
News at Ten: the next of kin
have not been notified
but I'm sure they are waiting.
Pity sells like hotcakes
in the ash strewn universes
of California, gofundme
for burial expenses, who said such things!

I thought the ashes already did that.

We as in we, the two of us
walk in different directions
going the same way over again
back to bed and up again,
as long as neither of us mentions
the epiphany more than once
we get along, tossing soap
and paper towels down the corridor.
Dorothy Parker get thee behind me!

Here she is again, running the bookshop
on misspellings and typographical errors,
the trend is towards memory, aka nostalgia
so much hard work to create accidental meaning
but if you delete enough, the mystery
will spoon full of sugar-it-down.
Was that really a stuffed chicken?
Did you mean to make fun of the pilgrims
or the Injuns?  Might be beautiful afterall
if the thumbnail shows the real blonde hair.
They can solve anything now with DNA.

All I could do at the reception
without you was walk to and fro,
appetizers to smoking area past the bar
where a boy with a wreath around his head
 points his gold lamé shoes, smirks a gotchagain!
Might as well be a stuffed chicken
if it weren't for the raw aggression.
My nafs pretty much said no thanks
to the newcomer regardless of the parka
and troubling set design, some folks
are stars, some are extras,
some just stuffed chickens.

And this is the old Southern Baptist church,
my mother said the dress flattered,
I knew then that somehow
as the keeper of the guest book,
I was afterthought, not good enough
to be the maid of honor but I really was.
It is not over by a long shot
until each guest there understands
the first step on that moon
wasn't theirs anymore than it was
Freemasonry across the street
who stood there last,
idolatry pre-exists the world,
Tolstoy a distant cousin of Tiny Tim..

Dog Road

I still have his bones you know.  Out in back, wrapped in a shopping bag, tufts of his tan hide still clinging to one of the sockets.  I think cities are for the young and winding down through the avenues trying to get out of there on a late Sunday afternoon, the sun leaves burnt residue on the construction vehicles at rest on the side of the road. The blue sedan in front of me says SKWSDM.

All I want is to go back, back and back.  I try hard not to become mesmerized in this Sunday light, this late afternoon everyone sitting down to their dinner or folding the last bit of the laundry they started Saturday morn, this aftermath of all the centuries before it Sunday light.  The streets are deserted, Craycroft, Wilmot, Kolb* and the artifacts there merely potential energy waiting to connect with hungover drivers back on the job tomorrow, improving the passage of time for the great population, the weight of their bones.  Not suits on sticks and sacks of sin, just bones, just cloth, just teeth and hair, just growth rings in the trees. Yes, cities are for the young and by the time I reach the interstate, the light has dimmed to funereal.  Not at all a sad thing and to the right is the long line of yellow train cars that have been stranded there for months now in a bit of wonderous totally empty quietude.  Air flowing through them, animals resting in their shade, coyote pups being bathed near one of the engines.  Who did this?  Have they been forgotten?

He was there that winter and I've no doubt it ruined his health.  All that misery and really, dogs have no way of knowing which one of us is asking forgiveness, which one is casting out the demons.  Yes it ruined his health.  I know it ruined mine or took the strength I had left.  But still, I have his bones although I could not find his skull. I did try. Holding onto them one feels close to it, perhaps the way we felt as children with the pink rabbit's foot keychain won at the carnival, chosen instead of a live goldfish or a poor little duck that would end up dead three days later anyway.

I pass through Davis like fingering through a file cabinet, one canyon wall after another.  This one is the two signs eight years ago, one after another on the same day. The next one is Grace's daughter's leg pinned on the median 11 miles northwest and there's five or so miles until a billboard reminds touristas to visit the mummy over in Wilcox. At last there is the gentle sloping downward ramp leading to the Amtrak stop where I got off the train with my brother's wife and waited at the Horseshoe for a ride the rest of the way home.  Each tune on the radio organizes a brazen number of memories into just two or three.

By the time I round the hill south of Tombstone, the last strip that drops down into the valley, a remainder of Mexico still visible now, the light is nearly gone and it is hard to imagine that it is still Sunday.  It's the turn of a century and I'm horseback in the post coital universe of the dead buckaroos where I am certain no one took their chances without the third dimension to adjust their rods in the wickedness of the desert at night.  It's all just words and heartbeats now, I'll be in bed soon and nearly frozen, just breathing.  All the ghosts there might just as well go home too, back to their positions on the buildings near the throaty owl atop the cedar two houses down.  I still have his bones you know and cities are for the young, the amnesiacs, the seekers of WSDM.

*Kolb from a Hebrew/Armenian tribe that settled in Germany

http://www.tucsonlocalmedia.com/import/article_80d9715a-ce48-5dc5-baf5-6d2234ef249a.html

Aging.com

MY MECUROCHROME

Here where we suck on our teeth
for hours upon endless hours
supposedly, 
forsaking these hard-won blemishes
and I used to think:
smiling, those people failed
at smiling.  Now I know.
The worst gets worse,
temptation gives way
and fires do what they are made to do.
At four the world was inside
a bottle of St. Joseph's baby aspirin,
the monkey blood was real
and it worked by looking
at the red cross on the white box
while an old man whittled
to pass the time, so far courageous.
At twenty the blur began to whir
a little, I could still run
a while on empty, lub dub, tick tock
and it was Christmas Eve
all over again, mind boggling afterall.
Bandages at thirty were S-M-L,
the black lady at the fertility clinic
said, "learn how to knit"
and I knew she was right
about each one costing one tooth.
In my forties the protective layer
began to thin, hair felt just a bit
more ragged yet there was still
an endless supply of saliva and blood,
I heard people say: hot flash
and winter is early this year.
In 1972, I calculated my age
at the turn of the century
but now, just twenty more years
might be too much to handle,
earthquake roulette, a ferris wheel
stopped at the top is where I'll be.
That was the first time
death got a taste of me,
August 18th, two fifteen
and it wasn't raining.

As it wanders beside me
pretending to be
the shadow that he is,
over the years
playing peek-a-boo
a book of matches in one hand,
a stop clock in the other,

 sneaky old prig
I'm not your type.

Day turns into
day again
I work on another molar
until sleep overcomes me
no guard on duty,
my seventh dog gone home
thinking: I'll be like the Indians,
head off to the mountains
where they'll find me
up against that tree
and smiling,
his bone in one hand,
my last smoke in the other.

REVISION:

MY MECUROCHROME
with apologies to Paul Simon

Here where we suck on our teeth
for hours upon endless hours
supposedly,
forsaking these hard-won blemishes
and I used to think:
smiling, those people failed
at smiling. Now I know.
The worst gets worse,
temptation gives way
and fires do what they are made to do.
At four the world was inside
a bottle of St. Joseph's baby aspirin,
the monkey blood was real
and it worked by looking
at the red cross on the white box
while an old man whittled
to pass the time, so far courageous.
At twenty the blur began to whir
a little, I could still run
a while on empty, lub dub, tick tock
and it was Christmas Eve
all over again, mind boggling afterall.
The thirties began in the eighties,
they used to say: mature for your age,
Chubby Checker remix teen thirteen,
bonfire of the banalities more like it
so the black lady at the fertility clinic
said, "learn how to knit"
and I knew she was right
about each one costing one tooth,
lay low Aunt Bee, save your strength
for soda crackers and suppositories.
In my forties the protective layer
began to thin, hair felt just a bit
more ragged yet there was still
an endless supply of saliva and blood,
I heard the witches say: hot flash
and winter is early this year,
all so much abracadabra.

In 1972, I calculated my age
at the turn of the century
but now, just twenty more years
might be too much to handle,
earthquake roulette, a ferris wheel
stopped at the top is where I'll be.
That was the first time
death got a taste of me,
August 18th, two fifteen
and it wasn't raining, a 24 hour flu,
10 years old, baby blanket
Delta Dawn doing the dishes,
mom is calling in the cats.

II

As it wanders beside me
pretending to be
the shadow that he is,
over the years
Mr. you-know-who reaper,
plays peek-a-boo,
a book of matches in one hand,
a stop clock in the other,
he's been on his way
from Lascaux shouting
Art Deco! grand finale!
eeieeiooooooooh!

III

sneaky old prig
I'm not your type.
I'm under my breath now:

IV

Day turns into
the shake of a lamb's tail
or faster, gnat begets gnat,
I work on another molar
until sleep overcomes me
without a guard on duty,
my seventh dog dead
and dragged off,
thinking: I'll be like the Indians,
head off to the mountains
where they'll find me
up against that tree
and smiling,
a badass dog bone in one hand,
my last smoke in the other,

A reverse painted lamp, all thoughts present to the mind in reverse because the past is over now.  Minding one's business a way of life after it is discovered there are no ears against the wall, no one is listening now.  Just behaving.  Believing and behaving.  Practicing.  Another tweet from that guy and I think I'll lose it.  He is so funny, so abrasive and tells it like it is.  Like it is to some anyway.  Not much happens between those tweets except the silence in the yard, swimming pool pump gurgling on in the background, birds chirping, gnats flirting underneath an invasive Chinese Elm.  The roots of that thing course under the garage, the house and take on the role of natural plumbing.  Aquaducts of a specialized understanding, a grid invisible to the naked eye.  I am certain, absolutely certain of this. No studies could provoke more thought than destiny towards each particular epiphany.  The noise of that prevents the sound of a school bus heading up the hill in late August when the sun turns ever so slightly and the light changes from white to yellow from becoming outrageous.  All those little kids heading towards a day full of hand sanitizer and criss crossed maps on the wall near the clock that they watch, waiting for their freedom.  One more degree and it might be too far and lavender would commence so much more ennui, would prove the Danes right. No, the sun is just right here in August.

On Par

With every Stark Warning
at once a tornado, a different bombing
these Amber Alerts, it's a wonder
anyone gets any sleep at all.
Just to clarify, this is a stark warning
about all those other bleak end of time scenarios
in which the abducted and raped,
pierced through savages hungering
after justice, starving for the Armageddons
types blather on about,
the stark warnings. 
Something is going on
no doubt about that.
Problem is, no one believes
a muslim, our veil still too thick:

Religion is the problem.

It's always been the conundrum.
It's a catch-22.

The Sea Shell

 

In this heaven shall they wait and all those

like us for you to pound your fist on the wall

and heave your head upon the concrete, to scrape

your knuckles before digging into your long lost skin?

Like your father listening stupidly to the radio

in this vault of sadness pending, as you tidy

up bank notes and shave for the last mistress,

there were so many things I could have told you.

It isn't love on the verge of the moon's darkest side

that locks those that ponder out of paradise. It isn't

the sound of night as it groans along and takes

out breaths one by one to examine them.

This ultimate secret that poisons the years

bloomed and blustered before it pried open

our mouths and eyes and ears, entered us

through our dreams and premonitions.

News and music and announcers whisper

sweet nothing into the landscape of time,

into the thousand years of study and testing

the ignorant and ugly ear.

The Parable of the Snake

 

Can't remember what that one had, when it happened,

a part of me began to let loose on the reverse side

of Jack's feeding plan, another spin off

with a nod to final debate, the gentle leading

as if we completely understand.

Who swapped peas for beans in the jar

and then switched jars, the one heart

scathed and debrided with scissors and flame

the other still chock full?

Too late say the stick men, too early

says the yawning hole at West 23rd,

keep walking toward the uneven light.

This army of bitten tongues swells

then retracts as if it is breathing,

a long tailed carnivore begins

and ends the similitude by swallowing.
Who will stop the marching? how deep
the tunnel winds toward the turbine,
tourists forage in the racks on the way.
We pass a sign that says buckle up!

There might not be enough love now

to finance the mortgage, hold up the cow.

These souvenirs might have to go, price slashed

and cells remaining on the handles.

A generation to come, several files by law

demolished in seven years like itches,
snouts and beaks crud and fodder,
bait and switch, rattle and shed.
One more long minute is all
the clock ever said as it clicked and tocked.

 

QIBLA

No one is more surprised that me.

There he is with his Qibla. I am fixated on the girl next to him, she couldn't be more than 18. She is adjusting her head ...cover, fixing it the way hijabi girls do when they are interested. Pushing hair in while pulling it out, eyes up and then down again, no one noticing the way their lithe bodies twist toward the object of their affection.

There is clapping and a bride and groom. The most beautiful bride a person could imagine. Her groom sits attentively near and love is revealed in its small moments. Ruths rule the castles of other people.

It is so.

I watch it over and over, stop, replay. A child wanders in and out of the frame, belongs to no one. The young woman cannot resist another look over and another. The cameras of heaven between Qibla and Qibla.

The two wests, the two easts under the pleasant lights . Tulsa. The way cities look from 35,000 like giant lava flows. The world is ancient.

And there she is, Rabab. Her heart beating inside the camera, her steady hand is on the wheel, and pushes him away and toward the person who with steady hand and that awful eye, one terrible eye and the other shut, packages memories.

How many angels were there? Two? Seventy-two?

She enters from the right side of his Qibla. Did she know I'd be watching her now six years ahead? How many treatments had been completed, how much chemo left to push in? In the beginning she used to wear ice caps but by the time I reached her after six days of one person after another entering Adlieh, entering Babdaat, it was clear that ice had not worked to prevent the theft of hair, the stolen color of her skin.

He is throbbing and glowing. His mind awash with houris. Taking his risik* before its time, playing the part of Sultan to his crew. The man of the hour and a child wanders into the frame, belongs to no one. The girl straightens her head cover, pushes hair in in order to pull some out. It is so. Take a walk on the Wild Side.

And Rabab turns him Qibla-ward, she is there forever looking at me saying: wake up.

handbook for freedom

-the skulker
-In fact the last yard
-forgiveness
-is in the details
-Rub al Qali
-Letter to the Dead
-The Intercessors
-Qibla
-Dear Plaster Saint

In Fact the Last Yard
I dig grave after grave
to put this into piece by piece,
the advantage of time...
when it serves the guilty
is time, like Satan
forever waiting for the inevitable
to come, bartering and stipulating
as he does. Put each one to rest
says the self accusing soul.
Resurrect them again says the devil
and again and again.
Try to pull the scatter
into a single location
as angels stand guard
and retrieve data
and how the stockpile grows!
  I, the forever grave digger,
shovel in hand, half asleep,
stand in the stillness. The glade
of anger a few yards away,
that wholesome place
where the wicked meet death.
In the chorus one hears
the cracked voice of reason
who screamed late into the night,
death opera, she sings lullabies
to the frozen and ashamed.
If only the others understood
the list of sins, the stinging ablation
of forgiveness, the Z track
of the maze where the surgeon
cauters and amends.

In Fact

I dig grave after grave
to put you into piece by piece,
the advantage of time
when it serves the guilty
is time, like Satan
forever waiting for the inevitable
to come, bartering and stipulating
as he does.  Put each one to rest
says the self accusing soul,
resurrect them again says the devil.
Try to pull the scatter
into a single location
as angels stand guard
and take their notes.
I, the forever grave digger,
shovel in hand, half asleep,
stand in the stillness.  The glade
of anger a few yards away,
that wholesome place
where the wicked meet death.
In the chorus one hears
the cracked voice of reason
who screamed late into the night,
death opera, she sings lullabies
to the frozen and ashamed.
If only all the others understood
the list of sins, the stinging ablation
of forgiveness, the Z track
of the maze where the surgeon
cauters and amends.

Forgiveness

...an origami in reverse
unfolding wing and leg and snout
Was it you that said
I am just crazy, that
my imagination takes over sometimes?
Did you whisper in low tones
that God was punishing me?
How natural it all seemed
in those times
all the wild animals tearing
at my flesh as you spied into our voices.
The checklist includes
miracles, backstabs, brainwashes.
A wallet sized photo, in the wallet.
The pink shirt which you testified
was green, as if that meant
I hadn't seen it
or the sandals and list.
The five separate swears
from which I abstained in fear
for us both.
As you thumbed through the files
in my backseat try as you might
to catch me offending another criminal
like yourself, does that make sense
to anyone but me?  And you?
There she is now trying to shake it off,
having the time of her life
as perpetuity forms into her regrets,
having lost love at that age,
having lost her hopes and courage,
all I see is alopecia and a black bra,
a few antics at the beach
and a liquor store receipt.
All I see is the desperate poverty
that drives non believers into hell.
Would it help to remember
the first call, the 'how are you now'
as I lay in a catatonia
from which escape is never certain:
love of my life/liar
and now as I hold back the demon
during lovemaking in a stupor
of mere tolerance, as I weep for passion
and her ghost, all is still
when I awake to the duty of ghusl
one more time.

OWL

When the owl slipped
away from the world,
he was in my arms
and wrapped in my prayer
rug, the one I keep in the back
seat of the '95 Nissan,
the murder weapon in
the driveway and it was
still warm. As he died
his head fell forward
like a newborn babe -
so few people ever see
an owl let alone hold
one, dead or alive,
so few ever hold both.

It hurt. It really hurt
to have killed such a thing:
half cat with hollow
bones and fake ears,
a witch with two hats.
For such a terrifying beast
they aren't made of much
and weigh no more than
a pair of boots or a rake.
There are no accidents though.
His body lay on the extra bed
until the morning. He refused
to answer as I returned
more than once to ask:

Which sign are you?
What can I do?
Are you sure?

The Skulker

Betrayal has seven layers, five of them destiny

sandwiched between black and white.

A card arrived with the bouquet,

in the back room on your bed.

The signal was busy the day at the beach.

One hundred and forty vignettes,

doesn’t matter what happened next or who held the camera.

In Adlieh I kept a key tied to my thumb

when you first met in long glances.

A falling star over my right shoulder

as you dropped the last vestige of your humanity.

She slid on the stretcher as we headed south

between love and the last meal.

That year the tomatoes volunteered and grapes returned

when beauty turned its hard back on memory.

I noted that it was a rudder not an axle

as defeat sculpted a new side between breezes

where we sat on the banks of Patagonia

waiting our turn.

Is In The Details

A neighbor reported that a woman had been yelling

For four hours on Blank Avenue, he did not know

If there was anyone else at the residence.

He could not see the last two months nor did

He pretend to have remorse over his actions.

The police shook their heads and then nodded,

Perused the array of dead plants on the porch,

Her disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes,

The witnesses parted curtains and sighed,

It was eight pm on the Ivory Coast,

Contaminants swirled in the air

But this was not pertinent nor did it indicate

The launch of a new investigation.

He whispered into the mouthpiece,

“Do you see how God has punished you?”

From his seat on the airport bus driving

Through the streets of Montserrado County

The day after a body was left until a quarter to four,

The viral count spewing itself onto the ground

Outside the luxury goods store beside someone’s

Next whore just before the curfew.

No, the neighbor reported he did not know

If anyone else was at the residence,

He could not see the torn clothes

In the bag at the back of the garage,

Could not see the last shard of glass

From an old portrait of boys that had hung

On her wall, he could not reach the bless-ed

Fragments of the wallet sized photo

Or the stack of boarding passes and business cards.

The good cop bad cop routine lasted a half an hour,

Until one of them spoke into his lapel,

The listener and speaker following the unwritten code,

“Aren’t you the mayor’s sister?” he asked,

Or weren’t you the one we caught behind the hedge

In the park?  Why haven’t you changed your address

With the DMV?  The cops evaluated sobriety as they

Perched their left hands on the holsters.

Luckily, this was not reported.

The devil wept in the back bedroom,

Looked solemnly at piles of documentation

Unable to decipher one last signature

Unable to sample the DNA or hear

The hand as it witnessed to the foot.

The Breast Sketch

It serves us so well.  And then it doesn’t.  It doesn’t obey, it finds new ways to remind us of what we are and what we are not.  We are young, we are attractive, we are mothers and grandmothers, we are human.

I sat upstairs in my home in South Lebanon.  It was warm so it must have been summer.  People were just waking up from their afternoon naps.  The sun was still up and Rabab’s three boys were outside making noise and fighting.  Billboards across the country sported images of women’s breasts substituted by watermelons, peaches, cherries.  Advocating self exams.

Rabab came up to talk.  Most people avoid my apartment, they know it is a place where I can go to escape whatever is going on down below.  To be free of the need for interpreters and just look through my old stuff, the things that have been left there over time by me and my children.  I go through these things when I am there and contemplate a lot of things.  The material world, the time we’ve spent there, the time I want to spend there in my old age and the place I am headed after death and ressurrection.

I remember one winter and it was very cold.  I was still drinking back then.  I’d go upstairs and the brothers would come up and we’d drink.  Wine and Arak.  We’d laugh so loud there could be no doubt in those below that we were not in control.  That day I’d taken the kids to the graveyard and we’d messed around by the graves scaring each other, some of the graves collapsing, some of them covered by photos in glass boxes.  We came home and my eldest was there doing her work for university.  The propane heater barely kept the frigid room warm even though all the doors that could be closedd were closed in order to heat the smallest area possible. 

I poured a gin and some coke and settled in for a nice evening.  The kids went to bed and by then I’d had another gin or two.  I went to bed nice and cozy with my bedroom door open and my son out on the couch, one daughter with me and the other secluded in the middle room. 

I drifted deep into sleep…..when the visitor showed up.  He’d been in my dreams before…just a shadow. Once he took me to see my ancestors.  The kids still tease me about that night journey.  Porter Hopkins they say, Porter Hopkins, one eighth Cherokee as all white people do.  There are no white ancestors so we have to make up some Injun ones.  Common practice where I come from in Arizona.

In the dream I saw an enormous wave closing down on me.  Inside of it were several children being tossed around by the force of the tidal surge.  The visitor said, “Save them.  They are going to die.”  I woke up with such a start that my heart was going over 150 beats a minute.  Not my normal but I woke up and there was my son standing at the door saying his stomach was upset and then he vomited.  I got up and cleaned him up, cleaned up the floor but my heart still beat out of control.  I put him to bed in my bed and went to the kitchen to try to get control of my heart that was easily doing 175 by then.  It just wouldn’t stop and I thought of the disrespect at the graveyard that day where we’d fooled around to scare each other.  Could that be the cause of my distress? I thought about the gin and Allah punishing me for my indiscretion.  I’d rather not believe that.

I heard my son get up again and moan a bit.  He was stumbling out the door and I grabbed him to get him to the toilet.  He didn’t make it though and covered the floor.  I cleaned him up again and he was so lethargic.  My heart completely wildly out of control.  The guilt just overwhelmed me for neglecting my children, teaching them wrong instead of right.

I returned to the bathroom and began to clean the mess.  I knew something wasn’t right and knelt on my hands and knees and began sobbing.  Sobbing for the sins, sobbing for the indecencies and the destruction caused by my chemical abuse.  Just sobbing out loud.

My eldest came out of her room and asked me “Mom, what’s the matter?”  She seemed just fine.  I told her, “go get your grandmother, something isn’t right”.  I didn’t want to disturb her at 3 in the morning but was helpless to solve the problem. Just helpless and losing control.  Perhaps I was going insane?

Em Melhem came charging up the stairs and threw open the door.  She said only one word and it might has well been death.  GAZ.  Propane.  She threw open the windows and doors to air out the salon and bedroom where my youngest two children still slept and would have slept for an ever if not for the visitor in my dream who said, “Save them.”

It was years later and Rabab came in and we sat across from each other in the kitchen.  She already had a left mastectomy.  Her hair was back and she was looking good.  It was over.  She was a survivor. We both were.  I had already apologized to her for my indiscretions of years before when she was left to worry down below while her husband and his brothers and I got drunk and laughed late into the nights. Apologized for making her feel uptight, for being a good muslim, for being the kind of person who could hold her tongue.

She wanted to talk to me about an implant.  It was heavy on her mind and I suppose she felt a little guilty wanting to look like everyone else, to stop stuffing her bra or wearing baggy clothes.  I am not sure but I imagine it is the same for all people who have an amputation of a body part.  They miss the normalcy of that.

I told her sure, they can take skin from your belly, your back.  They can tattoo you some nipples, they can do wonders “nowadays”. 

Suddenly, she asked me to see her.  To look.  I said sure.  I’m a nurse, I do that all the time.

Rabab lifted her top to show me what was left.  I swallowed so very hard.  I was unprepared, I was honored and then I was simply devastated.  Just devastated for Rabab.  I didn’t cry though.  I waited until she left and then called Pat Porter, my brother’s wife in America who had already had implants, already been there, done that and was doing fine.  I cried to her and could not contain my feelings.  She offered advice that I cannot remember now and it doesn’t matter.  There is no road map as they say for such things.  There are just no easy answers.

Hotel Dieu, Part II

I arrived to Beirut International that evening September 9.2013 and as I sat and watched the official butting out one cigarette after another, he took out some paper and in general took his own sweet time attending to whatever it was about my passport that made immigration pull me into that office. It was really hot and I was so so tired. He avoided looking me in the eye and other young officials went back and forth out of the office seemingly doing very important things but I was the only passenger in the terminal. The only one.

After what seemed to be an hour or more, he would ask me questions about my visit and I was on the verge of tears already, standing in line to get into the baggage claim area where you go through the standard glass enclosed cubicles to have things stamped vigorously by bored and unsympathetic young men in khaki. I always wonder why they are so unhappy or at least appear to be. Little did I know how many unhappy officials I would be meeting in the coming days. One man after another clothed in every shade of gray to khaki to brown with expressionless faces and smirks.

Finally another official entered the office and the boss was telling me to go with him to the baggage claim. At last I would be allowed to leave, to get to Hotel Dieu and see dear Rabab who probably had anything but a few minutes to a few days left in her life. This I knew and was on borrowed time already as we all are but in her case, the borrowed time was finite and there were no bargains left to be had on her behalf. As a nurse, these things we know are non negotiable.

By the time I was sent to get my bags, they were already in the abandoned pile in a room near the exit. I went to the door and was thankful that my two big suitcases were right in the middle. The official just stood there and let me pull both bags by myself. A grandmother tired from a long journey and he just let me struggle and instead of taking me to customs, he indicated we had to go down to an office. He said it would be alright, I would be able to leave the airport as soon as they cleared me from immigration.

I went into his office and left my heavy suitcases outside the door. He sat across from me and began to ask the same questions I had already answered in the other office. Why are you here? How long are you staying? The usual.

I thought to myself…well obviously, this is about Syria. In early September 2013, Obama was planning to attack Syria for using chemical weapons. Now we know that wasn’t true at all but I always knew it was a lie. It never made any sense. But I comforted myself with the thought that the Lebanese were just being very careful about who was entering the country that week. I could be anyone for all they know, a spy, a terrorist, a courier…who knows really.

The official flipped back and forth through my passport. He’d stop on one thing and go back to another. In total I’d been back to Lebanon 4 times since the war and evacuation in 2006.

The official called one of his peers in and his was the first real friendly face I’d seen all night. He was a big man, bald and he obviously felt for my misery. I kept telling them I had to get to Rabab and I would cry and they would offer tissues. The two of them flipped back and forth and back and forth in my passport. They asked me again why I was there and if I’d been living in Lebanon. I then remembered the Bahar. The Beach. Lebanon’s own Normandy Landing in reverse. We left in 2006 in a mass exodus…thousands and thousands of people shuttled to Naval vessels and ocean liners in order to escape the heavy bombardment. During the evacuation, we left the country on an amphibious from the beach, on to the USS Trenton and then on to Cargo planes times two to Ramstein and then on to Newark.

I also remembered my car accident on the autostrat in a Beirut suburb in 2004. I didn’t reveal that one fearing that was why I was being investigated. A car accident that was not really a car accident but a suicide attempt: my own. I wasn’t successful obviously. But it wandered around in my mind that I was finally going to be punished for that act that sent a couple other people to a hospital and most likely ended up with a garbage truck driver with a stiff fine. And me with broken ribs, sternum and a pneumothorax.

Finally the big man asked, if I had gone out in 2006 on the “Bahar”. I indicated I had and he looked thoroughly enlightened. He explained that apparently a lot of people had the same problem as I did and had problems when returning to Lebanon for a visit. They evacuated and the US Embassy never informed immigration that we’d left the country. I was so relieved and they said they would call the judge and I would be released just as soon as they could get me cleared. It would finally be over and I could maybe get some sleep in my apartment in Aramoun before going to check on Rabab in the morning which by now was just a few hours away.

I waited and waited and made small talk with the first official. With his broken English and my broken Arabic we were able to chat and he seemed more relaxed, more tolerant of the midnight burden I was providing. Keeping him from the quintessential security guard type nap, head on chest, police cap tilted down over the eyes. I was worried about Rabab’s brother Ahmad who must be outside the airport waiting for me to arrive. I begged the guard to call him and let him know I was there but he said he couldn’t do that. I pleaded and pleaded and they relented and let me call Ahmad outside to let him know there was a problem about the evacuation.

Finally the big guy came back and grabbed one of my suitcases and the other one took the second leaving me with just my carry on. We exited the airport but through another door, the one that no one tells you about. The car was waiting just outside already and I realized that the big guy must have pulled it around to pick us up. I asked where we were headed and they told me that they couldn’t get hold of the judge and so they were taking me all the way to the immigration office itself. I didn’t question that and slid into the back seat of an old compact car. In Lebanon, officials and police don’t always have an official car, they use their own. This wasn’t a surprise. I knew that already from my car “accident”. That cop that accompanied me to one hospital (I left AMA to try to escape) and eyed me like he knew there was something more to my little accident. I had to drive that cop to the police station myself in order to answer my charges that day in 2004, his eye on me the whole time, his knowledgeable eye. The awful eye that cops have when they know a person isn’t being quite honest.

…to be continued

Hotel Dieu


Today makes one year to the day. 

I arrived at Beirut via Rafik Hariri International. It was a late flight and I was on my way to tend to my sister in law Rabab who was in Hotel Dieu (God Hotel) in Beirut. 

She had metastatic breast cancer. It had spread to her brain, her bones and her liver. I had known for a year that she was terminal but she was not told. It is common in other cultures to fear telling the person about their situation. I always believed though that somewhere inside her heart, she knew the end of her life was near.

She'd already had rods put in her neck because the cancer had invaded her vertebrae. She suffered excruciating pain during that time...must have lasted over a year. She couldn't even lift herself out of bed sometimes and her personality started changing.

Our Rabab who was the life of the party so to speak...a muslim party with a devout muslim looks more like her making your favorite dish and calling you over for a shin dig involving jokes (mostly at her expense...we always liked teasing her to try to ruffle her extraordinarily dignified character), involving the kids playing and just sitting in her presence enjoying hospitality from the heart.

She began to feel a bit more angry at life. But Rabab's anger wasn't like anyone I have ever known as a registered nurse. It was highly controlled, and mostly she worried about her three young boys. This was what truly bothered her the most. The idea that they would be left without her to guide them in life, in their Islam, in the world so full of challenges and hardships and joys.

I was not aware by the time I boarded the plane in Tucson on my way to Beirut that the cancer had spread to her brain. At that time, I was only told about her liver and knew that was the call I had to attend to. The call I had to follow.

I was not a good friend to Rabab in the many months of her disease process. Not at all. I will never claim I was her support, her confidante or even a good advisor in the years before her death. All I know is that she loved me and if she could, she would go to the end of the earth to bring me whatever I asked for and as an RN I only hoped to get there to help with her death because I knew she was dying, I knew that the death process is best managed with friends by your side, children outside playing in the yard and wanted desperately to get her out of a hospital and into her father's home in the south of Lebanon. I knew that it might not turn out that way if I just sat around in the US and watched from afar. I believed that I had something to do there but in the end I benefitted far more from my attendance. Far more.

I reached Beirut at about 8 in the evening. It was a slow day at the airport, I think it was a Monday and I'd been en route far too long already. I knew she'd had her liver tapped for fluid and with that goes internal bleeding because the liver is failing.

I handed my passport to the immigration clerk and his face changed. He said to me, "one moment please". He turned his computer off and went into the glass office where I could see another traveler conversing with the immigration head at the airport.

He reminded me of Kamal Ataturk. All such foreign officials in the Middle East seem to have sprung from the loins of that infamous secularist who marched thousands of Armenians to their deaths in the 20th century. That portrait (Ataturk)decorates the walls of every Turkish police station, most of the restaurants, the majority of hotel lobbies and no doubt people's the nightmares of the Turkish population night to night. I met that portrait in a Turkish police station outside of the hidden cities of Cappadoccia and it still brings me to tears. He looks like a Vampire and perhaps he was.

After a brief conversation between the two officials, I was told to enter the glass office and sat on the flea bitten couch in front of the chief's desk. There was a young woman and she was trying to explain something about her passport. My Arabic is limited but what I gathered was hers was expired but it was Lebanese and she was given a free pass to leave but would have to go to the immigration to fix the matter before she would be allowed to leave the country again.

II

No one is more surprised than me. 

There he is with his Qibla. I am fixated on the girl next to him, she couldn't be more than 18. She is adjusting her head cover, fixing it the way hijabi girls do when they are interested. Pushing hair in while pulling it out, eyes up and then down again, no one noticing the way their lithe bodies twist toward the object of their affection.

There is clapping and a bride and groom. The most beautiful bride a person could imagine. Her groom sits attentively near and love is revealed in its small moments. Ruths rule the castles of other people.

It is so.

I watch it over and over, stop, replay. A child wanders in and out of the frame, belongs to no one. The young woman cannot resist another look over and another. The cameras of heaven between Qibla and Qibla.

The two wests, the two easts under the pleasant lights . Tulsa. The way cities look from 35,000 like giant lava flows. The world is ancient.

And there she is, Rabab. Her heart beating inside the camera, her steady hand is on the wheel, and pushes him away and toward the person who with steady hand and that awful eye, one terrible eye and the other shut, packages memories.

How many angels were there? Two? Seventy-two?

She enters from the right side of his Qibla. Did she know I'd be watching her now six years ahead? How many treatments had been completed? In the beginning she used to wear ice caps but by the time I reached her after six days of one person after another entering Adlieh, entering Babdaat, it was clear that ice had not worked to prevent the theft of hair, the stolen color of her skin.

He is throbbing and glowing. His mind awash with houris. Taking his risik* before its time, playing the part of Sultan to his crew. The man of the hour and a child wanders into the frame, belongs to no one. The girl straightens her head cover, pushes hair in in order to pull some out. It is so. Take a walk on the Wild Side.

And Rabab turns him Qibla-ward, she is there forever looking at me saying: wake up.

The Lote Tree

And still there is more 
Saintpaulia
how tiny you are
the smallest 
flower or you are 
a dangerous mind
boggling dragon to
pursue us dragging
mysterious around
the dusty old cosmos
how your petals
sparkle and those too
are small and creep
into the outraged eye
like criminals
bright dainty sparkles
the sun comes up
glistening now
in the window
which is also
dangerously small
particularly thin
between the wind
that might have
touched the fragrant
Bouillon of stars
and the air inside
of this cozy container.
How many stars
would it take 
to put out
your nuptial glitter?
In comparison
how trite
to see you there
and wonder.