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