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And Went Into a Person House
Eyes appropriated from peacock feathers
Swirling with all these items
Half a boy’s body and half good
And derelict of house and duty of care
The political animal does its business indoors
Depending from the vertex
Of the ideal mountain
And with each chiming of the building shells
False world bones
Flying buttresses like legs
On a centipede killed out of sheer aversion
My face expanding past its skin
Ten billion neurones and all of them not triangular
Without which no diamond can be manufactured
A mixture of consistency and inconsistency combined
Not mixed, to what consistency
White, Red, Black
Remember your young wife, your first
You killed her in a way you couldn’t understand
Afterward sifting through the straw and dried flowers
Covering the earthen floor with memories
Of summer and the symbolic threshold
To sprinkle its earth on your head
But finding it too compacted already
Then on the eve of the festival
When the elixir known as “liquor of the shades”
Was by tradition to be distributed
Three drops each person through a dropper, reluctantly
By a clergy unable to extirpate the practice
A trail of her hair led you through the snow
To the capital, on your knees, which was strange
Romantic love not yet having been artificed
The mall was filled with overpriced essentials
Cheap processed items for packed lunches
Market stalls bordering high fashion outlets
Upstairs a kind of hotel
Where from the top floor mezzanine facing inwards
Over the vault, where it seemed
A rollercoaster might have been, you saw her
On a trapeze defying death, and failing, falling
Soon reappearing to repeat the same performance
But before you could gather enough of that special liquor
She was reborn
Hot trash
This time, with cherry-coloured hair
Whose style kept changing
Even thus disguised you recognised her
On a dating site, whereupon
Determined not to let her escape again
It took you five minutes to find her on social media
And you laid your siege, noting for insurance
The names of her husband, parents, parents in law, etc.
Which were handy when once more she became a ghost
In the end, luckily for both of you
It turned out blackmail was a huge turn on for her
Life Review
A horizontal birthday candle
To watch the pretend movie
A tub of hardened water
And the Headrest of Shu
Are all I have in my fallout shelter
A golfball-sized piece
Of dough caught in the window frame
The rotten sill bearing twenty coats
With organic, not crooked outline
Which scraped off would reveal
Yet youthful flesh
Proprietor and proprietress, that is
Of this dwelling when first built
As if a child painted his parents
Artist and model copulating like plump worms
Under bark
No sun per se
Only blurred yellow light
Of evening blushing through
The bran-flecked glass
Bush Block
Girondins en route to their comeuppance
Togaed martyrs with daggers in their pockets
Figures, constitutions, rental agreements
Sculpted in everything from alabaster
Down to Paris plaster, demolished
The lots where they stood redeveloped
In high-density Styrofoam
And littering the grass
Like stones a farmer piles not into cairns
But merely heaps, their severed heads, etc.
Jalal El-Kadali is a Sufi sheikh whose ghazals can be encountered here at Terror House, at Expat Press, and soon at Misery Tourism. Follow him on Twitter here.