Station Zed Read Online Free Page B

Station Zed
Book: Station Zed Read Online Free
Author: Tom Sleigh
Pages:
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the bore hole
    and here the body asks and asks about the role
    it’s asked to play: no matter how it’s dressed.
    Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena
    who eats even the bones
    and shits bone-white scat from the calcium.
    No matter if it sleeps under a dome
    of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun,
    or hides in a spider hole
    or walks around in uniform behind plate glass,
    the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown.
    On the television the blade runner is facing down the skinjob,
    and of the two, who is the more human?
    On the table there isn’t a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey
    that keeps whispering, It’s OK to be this way, nobody will know .
    And then the boy who rolls his pantlegs
    up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground
    is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton.
6/ THE COMING
    At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air
    and hangs there beautiful and repulsive.
    Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds
    don’t stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat
    wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound—
    the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out
    as you go round and round the roundabout
    at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the Casspir
    are all pretending to be dead.
    The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses,
    Hey, can’t you get my flak jacket adjusted
    so it doesn’t crush my collar?
    Leaves softly undulating, little waves of leaves undergoing shifts
    between astral blue and green, leaves always breaking on leaves
    in the little breeze that the Casspir passing stirs in the heat—
    stirring the memory of putting your fingers
    in the wounds of a blast wall at KM4 as if you were
    doubting Thomas waiting for Christ to appear:
    thumb-sized holes for AK-47s,
    fist-sized for twenty caliber, both fists for fifty.
7/ RAP
    Out of a mouth of bone that lives inside
    the darkness in a stone like a cricket hidden
    somewhere inside a dark house, the incessant stridulation
    sounds like the song, I would love to be martyred in
    Allah’s Cause and then get resurrected
    and then get martyred and then get resurrected
    again and then get martyred …
    If your trouser legs drag on
    the ground you’re sullied, you’re unclean.
    Be a Fedayeen. Be a Marine. On the other side
    of language where none of the concepts stick
    the boy with his trousers rolled liked
    what he called “the rap music”
    and a t-shirt emblazoned with the word “Knicks.”
8/ AT COURT
    Off behind the acacias in a little oasis of galvanized shade
    the soldiers sit smoking and joking,
    they talk to you with shy smiles and gentle laughter,
    they offer cigarettes before you can offer them,
    their tact and manners are exquisite.
    It’s like being at a king’s court where the thrones
    are three-legged stools, where the knights before battle
    go around in regulation-issue sleeveless undershirts,
    where the gold and silver floor is dust packed hard by boots.
    Now the wind is blowing through the trees,
    the scene is changing as the day moon grows strong,
    leaves hanging from the branches
    drip and curdle in the afternoon sun.
    The soldiers lie down on mats, their faces slacken,
    sleep runs like a hand over their skinny bodies,
    and a goat climbs into a huge cooking pot
    and licks and licks the sides clean.
9/ REUNION
    The journalist who doesn’t sleep walks into a bullet.
    The young boy with trousers rolled waits at KM4.
    Before them both is a door into the earth that swings back
    like a cellar door in the last century.
    Ahmed Abdi Ali Patrice Andy Bill Rika Zero Idil Yoko
    meet in the underworld at The Greasepit Bar
    and talk about rotations up to the world of the living:
    they come back like Patroclos to accuse dreaming Achilles
    of having forgotten and forsaken him,
    faithless in death to their companions …
    The sun compressed to a sliver shines through
    mesh of my mosquito net that holds back
    mosquitos hovering like
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