Catherine Cobham 

Translator

We, who are strewn about in fragments, whose flesh flies through the air like raindrops, offer our profound apologies to everyone in this civilised world, men, women and children, because we have unintentionally appeared in their peaceful homes without asking permission. We apologise for stamping our severed body parts into their snow-white memory, because we have violated the image of the normal, whole human being in their eyes, because we have had the impertinence to leap suddenly on to news bulletins and the pages of the internet and the press, naked except for our blood and charred remains.
We apologise to all those who did not have the courage to look directly at our injuries for fear they would be too horrified, and to those unable to finish their evening meals after they had unexpectedly seen fresh images of us on television.
We apologise for the suffering we caused to all who saw us like that, unembellished, with no attempt having been made to put us back together or reassemble our remains before we appeared on their screens. We also apologise to the Israeli soldiers who took the trouble to press the buttons in their aircraft and tanks to blow us to pieces, and we are sorry for how hideous we looked after they aimed their shells and bombs straight at our soft heads, and for the hours they are now going to spend in psychiatrists’ clinics, trying to become human again, like they were before our transformation into repulsive body parts that pursue them whenever they try to sleep.
We are the things you have seen on your screens and in the press, and if you made an effort to fit the pieces together, like a jigsaw, you would get a clear picture of us, so clear that you would be unable to do a thing.

2008

- What’s the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo?  
- Antwerp

In this city that is nourished on diamonds 
barbed wire grows in poets’ verses 
appointments die on the calendar 
my hands stop touching your lips 
policemen no longer laugh 
a taxi stops when its driver is killed by a bullet from a sniper in Damascus 
in front of Antwerp Central Station 
terror stops on PlayStation 
and I take myself under my arm and stop stopping 
I think of the distance between my lips and your skin 
as if I wasn’t born in Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees in Damascus in 1979 
as if you weren’t born in the Milky Way
 
In this city where they clean blood off diamonds with the same care as 
doctors cleaning blood from the wound of an injured man whose life they’ve saved 
I pass lightly as a tank over asphalt 
carrying my verses like a street vendor 
every time I go towards the sea I am eaten up by the desert emerging from the suitcases of emigrants 
and from my passport recognised by nobody but you 
I am the writer of poems that talk of death as if they’re talking of hope 
and of war as if God exists 
since my friends died I’ve become a lone wolf 
cornering joy and trampling on it as if it were a harmful insect 
my friends who were tortured to death sit next to me in their most elegant clothes as if we were at a reception 
and my mother searches for me down the phone lines 
to make sure that I’m still pissing on this planet
 
I’ve cleaned my room of any trace of death 
so you don’t feel when I invite you for a glass of wine
that despite the fact I’m in Stockholm 
I’m still in Damascus
 
In this city nourished on blood diamonds 
I remember a blood wedding 
I remember oblivion 
I stand in the middle of a black and black group photo of poets 
who have gone from here 
the notes you have left in the margins of my poems make me sad 
my heart becomes a wooden scarecrow to chase away Hitchcock’s birds 
my innocent heart that cannot bear it 
becomes as harsh as honest words 
and the street becomes a notebook 
you are the only one who can change the street into a notebook 
innocently you take my hands so we can cut off the head of the year 
then the World Bank collapses 
the middle class stands against the emigrants 
a security man armed with history stands to mark out a barrier between the suburbs and happiness 
skin colour stands like a checkpoint between us 
between the harbour that imports freedom 
and the street extending from the graveyard to the bedroom 
the war has not wearied me 
rather the poems that talk of the war 
the cold cities have not wearied me 
but these poems that talk of cold cities have eaten my fingers 
and I cannot dance without my fingers 
I cannot orient to the Orient without them 
a heart attack kills the wall clock 
and my friends bear false witness and say that life is wonderful 
this city is collapsing in on itself like a black hole 
I mean a green hole 
and the street runs scared
this is the first time I’ve seen a street running in the street 
this is the last time I’ve seen a house leaning on a sad woman’s laughter left behind in the kitchen 
in order to stay upright 
and on the smell of spices scattered by the shell in order to stay alive 
the neighbours fled without shutting the windows open on the massacre 
without shutting the cookery book open on page 73 
the birds on the nearby tree moved into the house 
they lived in the half-open kitchen cupboard 
a 120mm mortar shell manufactured in the Soviet Union in the year 1987 
to fight imperialism 
would kill them 
the canary died of starvation in the cage 
that’s war 
canaries die of starvation in their cages when their jailers vanish 
their jailers who left home and never came back 
the home that collapsed on the poems of poets whose country betrayed them 
their country used to make them weep and now they weep for their country 
see how they recount their grief in front of strangers 
with their poems they kill time 
with their hands they ring bells 
but nobody has time to hear the echo except a few of those killed in the war 
and the barmaid starts a discussion with me about how Syrians have the right to die properly with the body whole 
in one piece 
and about loneliness
about how people have the right to find somebody to sleep next to them in the evening 
and to leave them asleep when they go to work in the morning 
without asking them to move on 
fine 
let’s take this sack of stones off our back
and shout gently via the keyboard 
we the undersigned on the asphalt 
announce that we are tired 
and that regardless of our different backgrounds 
we suffer from the same shit 
I too like you live alone in a flat with three windows 
two look out onto Antwerp 
but the third is my computer screen looking out onto Damascus 
- have you visited Damascus? 
- no 
- ok I’ll try to describe it to you: the temperature in summer is 37° 
it’s the city where the summer temperature corresponds to a person’s body temperature 
- have you visited Antwerp? 
- no 
- ok I’ll try to describe it to you: it’s the blood diamond sparkling in the white light of shop windows 
its shine reflecting a black man who found it in Kinshasa then was himself found murdered 
by a bullet from his friend’s gun 
in order that a woman from Montreal could wear a ring with a stone polished in Tel Aviv 
given to her by her husband born in Buenos Aires 
when they were on a trip to the Arizona desert 
so that she would forgive him for cheating on her with her South African friend 
when he was laundering his money in Dubai 
- do you know how the desert and money laundering differ and how they are similar? 
- no 
- the difference is that the desert needs water and money laundering doesn’t 
- and the similarity? 
- the similarity is that money laundering is dry, dry as the desert in Arizona 
ok there’s no denying that I float in you like a butterfly in magma 
and feed you my words so you grow slowly like the area of destruction that came into being 
when your sorrow collided with my life 
your presence in my life had a negative effect on postmodern poetry in the northern half of the globe 
and I have to confess to you that the shelf life of many of my poems expired with the sudden appearance in them of your metaphors 
and that you had a share in making holes in the tank where they store the Arabic language 
through your systematic campaigns to add marginal notes to my texts 
and that with premeditation and close observation you undertook to revive me 
and this is an offence punishable under the poets’ constitution 
and that your details scattered around my house provoke a desire in me to throw the television set out of the window 
and to sit watching you instead when you are killing time 
I confess too that there are many dubious things that have begun to happen since I smelt the smell of your breasts 
for example: 
I’ve broken several wine glasses in the period since you moved in with me 
most of them committed suicide by jumping out of my hand as I tried to wash away the traces of your lipstick 
I stole some time in order to make my day last 25 hours 
I assumed a false expression to make myself look happy 
I loved you 
I said in a press interview after I met you that I had only lied twice in my life 
and that was the third time I’d lied 
in spite of the whole happy tragedy that my life has been 
you refused to fire the mercy bullet when I begged you to 
and granted me a new life 
you accuse me of a lack of objectivity in my poems, fine, I’ve never been objective in my life 
I’ve always been biased and I have double standards 
I have been biased in favour of blacks against racism, in favour of the resistance against the occupiers, of militias against armies. I have taken the side of the Red Indians against the white men, the Jews against the Nazis, the Palestinians against the Israelis, the immigrants against the neo-Nazis, gipsies against borders, original inhabitants against colonialists, science against religion, the present against the past, feminism against patriarchy, women against men, your side against other women, Kafka’s side against routine, poetry’s side against physics 
physics 
God damn physics 
why do the immigrants drown then after they’ve breathed their last they float on the surface of the water? 
why doesn’t the opposite happen? 
why don’t people float when they’re alive and drown when they’re dead?
 
fine 
let’s call things by their names 
books are the graveyards of poems 
houses are concrete tents 
dogs are wolves that have accepted humiliation
prayer rugs remind me of flying carpets 
my room has fallen in love with your green shoes
I drown in you as Syrians drown in the sea 
oh God 
look where the war has taken us 
even in my worst nightmares it never occurred to me 
that one day 
I would say in a poem
I drown in you as Syrians drown in the sea
 
****
 
every shell that falls on Damascus is just a page torn out of Descartes’ book
when we were born 
life was coloured 
and photos were black and white 
now photos are coloured 
and life is black and white

Poem for Anish Kapoor


It was a little mountain, resembling a cloud, towering above nothing, high as a bird in the air, big as a tree, and it was very lonely, for before the invention of mobiles, mountains used to correspond with birds, so that memories wouldn’t die.

It was a little mountain that dreamed of the city and preferred crowds, but it remained all alone, for mountains thirty earthquakes ago didn’t visit one another, because of family disputes.

A little mountain, and poets used to think it was a rock that had fallen from a bull’s horn, but a chance occurrence in the hunting season led them to find out that the mountain was female. In the hunting season, in a year archaeologists have not yet discovered, poets were chasing a poem when it caught them off guard and sought refuge in a cave at the foot of the mountain. They went in after it, not knowing that they had entered the mountain’s vagina. This was the first act of sexual intercourse between humans and a mountain. It produced a city, which linguists called the beginning, and poets called Damascus, the daughter of a lawful act of adultery, the first city.

The moment a mountain fails its physics exam, another mountain yawns and the city falls asleep as if nothing has happened, as if everything has happened. Who said two mountains never meet? I’m going to correct the expression for you: if Muhammad won’t go to the mountain, the mountain will come to Muhammad, no, I’m going to correct it again: if Kapoor won’t go to the mountain, then the mountain will come to him.

Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired. ‘They cross the bridge at daybreak fleet of foot’* and die with no phone coverage. I see them through night vision goggles and follow the heat of their bodies in the darkness; there they are, fleeing from it even as they run towards it, surrendering to this huge massage. Massacre is their true mother, while genocide is no more than a classical poem written by intellectual pensioned-off generals. Genocide isn’t appropriate for my friends, as it’s an organised collective action and organised collective actions remind them of the Left that let them down.

Massacre wakes up early, bathes my friends in cold water and blood, washes their underclothes and makes them bread and tea, then teaches them a little about the hunt. Massacre is more compassionate to my friends than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Massacre opened the door to them when other doors were closed, and called them by their names when news reports were looking for numbers. Massacre is the only one to grant them asylum regardless of their backgrounds; their economic circumstances don’t bother Massacre, nor does Massacre care whether they are intellectuals or poets, Massacre looks at things from a neutral angle; Massacre has the same dead features as them, the same names as their widowed wives, passes like them through the countryside and the suburbs and appears suddenly like them in breaking news. Massacre resembles my friends, but always arrives before them in faraway villages and children’s schools.

Massacre is a dead metaphor that comes out of the television and eats my friends without a single pinch of salt.

_______

* Quote from ‘The Bridge’ (al-Jisr), a poem by Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi.

Her grief fell from the balcony and broke into pieces, so she needed a new grief. When I went with her to the market the prices were unreal, so I advised her to buy a used grief. We found one in excellent condition although it was a bit big. As the vendor told us, it belonged to a young poet who had killed himself the previous summer. She liked this grief so we decided to take it. We argued with the vendor over the price and he said he’d give us an angst dating from the sixties as a free gift if we bought the grief. We agreed, and I was happy with this unexpected angst. She sensed this and said ‘It’s yours’. I took it and put it in my bag and we went off. In the evening I remembered it and took it out of the bag and examined it closely. It was high quality and in excellent condition despite half a century of use. The vendor must have been unaware of its value otherwise he wouldn’t have given it to us in exchange for buying a young poet’s low quality grief. The thing that pleased me most about it was that it was existentialist angst, meticulously crafted and containing details of extraordinary subtlety and beauty. It must have belonged to an intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge or a former prisoner. I began to use it and insomnia became my constant companion. I became an enthusiastic supporter of peace negotiations and stopped visiting relatives. There were increasing numbers of memoirs in my bookshelves and I no longer voiced my opinion, except on rare occasions. Human beings became more precious to me than nations and I began to feel a general ennui, but what I noticed most was that I had become a poet.

In the North, close to God’s boundary wall, enjoying a developed culture, the magic of technology, the latest achievements of human civilization, and under the influence of the drug that grants safety, health insurance, social security and freedom of expression, I lie in the summer sun as if I am a white man and think of the South, contriving excuses to justify my absence. Emigrants, travellers, refugees go by me, genuine inhabitants, bogus inhabitants, tax-dodgers, alcoholics, the newly rich and racists, all of them crossing in front of me as I sit in the North thinking of the South, composing spurious stories in order to cover up my absence and explain how I can’t attend.

Yes, I can’t attend, for the road between my poem and Damascus is cut off for postmodern reasons: these include the fact that my friends are ascending to God at a rapidly increasing rate, faster than my computer processor, while other reasons relate to a woman I met in the North who made me forget the taste of my mother’s milk, and some are connected to the fishes in the fish tank, who won’t find anyone to feed them in my absence.

I can’t attend, for the distance between my reality and my memory confirms that Einstein was right and the energy produced by my longing equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

I can’t attend but I can be absent, yes, I can be absent with great skill. I’ve become an expert in recent times and I’ve acquired a diary where I make a note of the times I have to be absent and I have memories that haven’t happened yet.

I can be absent as if I have never existed, as if I am nothing, as if air has never entered my lungs, as if I’ve never had enemies before, as if I’m concentrated memory loss, a coma transmitted like a contagious disease.
           
I can’t attend as I’m currently busy with the cold war I fight daily with isolation, with indiscriminate shelling by darkness, with systematic depression, with the attacks of loneliness that target the kitchen, the checkpoints that stand between me and summer, the bureaucracy caused by the separation of the legislative and executive powers, the routine procedures of the tax department. You’ve talked to me at length about the war, now let me tell you a little about the peace that I enjoy here in the North. Let me tell you about gradations of skin colour, what it means when people don’t know how to pronounce your name, about black hair, about the democracy that always favours the rich, the health insurance that doesn’t cover your teeth because they aren’t part of the body. Let me talk to you about the tasteless vegetables, the flowers with no smell, the racism masked by a smile. Let me tell you about the fast food, fast trains, fast relationships, slow rhythms, slow grief, slow death.

Will you believe me if I say to you that my shoes are tired, that inside me is a wolf I can’t restrain once he’s smelt blood? Will you believe me if you see on my body the marks of the bullets that have hit my friends there, while I’m sitting here in front of a computer screen? Do you believe in coincidence? My absence is a coincidence planned with extreme care, a well-considered random act. I’ve discovered by coincidence that it’s no coincidence that coincidences happen, and in fact the coincidence is when they don’t happen. The point is, will you believe me if I swear to you by music? I swear by music that a European residence permit prevents us from being shot but makes it more likely that we’ll kill ourselves.
           
Fine, I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you why I can’t attend. It happened on a summer’s evening when I met a sad woman on my way home. In her hand she carried a forest and in her bag a bottle of wine. I kissed her and she became eleven months pregnant…

That’s not what’s stopping me attending. I’ll tell you the truth. Damascus caught me in bed with another woman. I tried to put things right, to say what happened was a spur of the moment thing, nothing more, and it wouldn’t happen again. I swore by everything, by the moon, fireworks, women’s fingers, but it was all over, so I fled to the North.

That’s not what’s stopping me attending. I’ll tell you the truth. When I was a child I didn’t know anything about the market economy. Now, after I’ve become a citizen of a first world country, I don’t know anything about the market economy.
           
This isn’t what’s stopping me attending. I’ll tell you the truth. When I was intending to come, my suitcase collided with an item of breaking news and my language was smashed to bits, the passersby grabbed hold of the pieces and I no longer had a language…

That isn’t what is stopping me attending. I’ll tell you the truth, I’m dead, yes, I died several years ago.

That isn’t what’s stopping me attending. I’ll tell you the truth…

Even if the way to Ithaca is more beautiful than Ithaca, the way to Damascus is not more beautiful than Damascus.

1
The city resembles wrinkles wrapped around one another like the bodies of those forgotten in the prison cells of the third world, as prominent as a punctured memory, as conspicuous as feast day clothes, as brazen as the threads in a Persian carpet. This city has always fascinated me with her accumulation of layers, one layer sleeping with another, giving birth without being pregnant, a city that wears a burqa on her face and leaves her brown legs bare. The city cuts through me when I try to seduce her. As I come and go each day, I cut through her like the godfathers of the proletarian revolution cutting off the heads of the bourgeoisie, then the heads of their own friends, I cut through her with the patience of a camel, the zeal of a Kalashnikov and the appetite of a locust heading for the fields in the morning.
The city is like memories, vague, but shyly caressing reality, burdening our sleep with an increase of desire and our conscious minds with more questions and, like the funerals of strangers in strange cities, arousing pity without shaking hands with grief, moaning in the night as if afflicted by a desire to migrate and scratching the skin of our conversations with nails of obscure yearning, then slipping into bed beside us. When we used to wake up in the middle of death at the sound of her sobbing, she would cover her face with a pillow and our dreams would come crashing down.
The city is like tourists, with their rashness, digital cameras, sandals unfamiliar with the language of pavements in the cold north, heavily taxed cheerfulness, hashish cigarettes that they deny all knowledge of when they return to the land of snow and ice, the city is like them with their fake bronze colour after their bones have soaked up the sun and vitamin D, and their cameras have soaked up the city.
The city is like sellers of lottery tickets with their lifeless faces and their reports to the intelligence services following the rise in the price of bread, the city is like them as they plant dreams along the streets, promising millions to passersby, while their children are suckled on water and only win hunger.
The city resembles her seven gates, open and without surveillance like the beds of whores, closed to the tiniest ray of light like the tombs of the dead.
The city resembles Damascus.

2
Here the city lies on her back, growing paler as the sun burns her skin, and the noise extends to the city limits, from the head of the river to the middle of her soul, stretching her umbilical cord that has never been cut and casting her poor to her outer edges, her poor who, whenever they try to claw their way up her body, fall under the wheels of her vastness. The scratches that inhabit her skin are her roads intersecting with non-divine providence, and the black cloud that hangs around her neck is merely the result of her chronic reluctance to give up smoking. O god, how can I scale her breast that looks down over her wrinkles, where grey houses extend from the base to the nipple, buildings that have accumulated from the chance discovery of pleasure between a man and a woman up to the beginning of civilisation - it’s incredible how a breast can be called a mountain without the use of a metaphor - and where a path taken by those who have gone through life without loving their enemies is still there, like a tombstone transmitting history? Here the city lies, fresh, as if she doesn’t precede the alphabet by numerous disasters, surrounded by walls that don’t resemble a siege, and you can almost, if you stop to listen carefully, hear the faint echo of our earliest ancestors, who drank of her waters and some of whom, by virtue of heredity, have infiltrated your blood that is blighted by songs. She is the earliest cemetery, which people have celebrated as evidence that memories are real. I pass her, a stranger to myself, so she passes me without recognising my face. I distinguish her in the faces of strangers who have belonged to her, so she and I are briefly deluded into thinking we are one. She is old like a fossil and I am new like the end of history, I hold on to her dress like a child and she holds on to my heart like a woman and we commit a poem, I the dreamer hunting down verse and she reality giving birth to children and not raising them, I the ephemeral and she the eternal, everlasting, I the fatalist stuffed with transcendental truths, she the heretical realist. There is no consolation for me, and no harm done to her, except that by chance we are lovers.

3
Descending the road towards her waist, I cross paths with doubt. He is heading for complete certainty, and I almost brush against his smooth edge. I smash time’s piggy bank and take out three days and a few hours, the moments of joy that I’ve collected throughout my life, which is still just alive. A Kalashnikov that I inherited from a communist who happened to pass by my wound still weighs down my right shoulder, so my left shoulder has become higher and prouder. I am sinking deeper into the quagmire of my days, the threat of being slowly sucked down is more imminent. The orange tree that keeps appearing in my dreams and tastes like Gaza, with a faint bitterness resembling the air of Damascus, resists definition by Wikipedia but not by Ibn Arabi. At the end of the alley leading to the “Street Called Straight” in Damascus I meet Ananias and go with him to Judas’s house. We walk along dazzled by the details that fall down from the sky as a result of artistic flaws in the Lord’s architecture. We meet martyrs waiting in the lobby for someone to answer their existential questions as to why they are crammed together with their enemies in one room under a banner reading ”We are all martyrs”. This city eats her brother’s flesh and belches because she is too full. This city is fenced in by stories and the prayers of those afflicted with piety. This city has not cut the umbilical cord that joins her to death, sharpening her knife every night in the hope of approaching carnage. If only I was as warm as a car’s engine in your sad winter or as cold as the grave in your bitter summer, o concrete desert, o city that drinks tea to the sound of battle songs, and dances the dance of defeat on the corpses of her lost sons, amen.

4
I don’t have light enough in my quiver to distribute to Maeterlinck’s blind men, walls enclose meaning inside my soul as the city encloses my memories. O my believing soul, o my heretical body. Now I shall confess my original sin: all my poems, which I planted in the flesh of your days like a rusty knife, are not my poems. I stole them from those who had been forgotten, or who had forgotten, collected them from white hospital beds and from the groans of the tortured. They are the memory of women sacrificed before God’s masculinity, the gurgling of those who have died of cold in the midst of the song, the dream when it is devoid of dreamers. Yes, they are not my poems, they are the petrified memories of those who lived in times long gone, whose names we don’t know, but whom we carry in our pale features, they are wishes not realized, second-hand laughter, they are not my poems, they are the breaths of the drowned and the hanged, and the souls that flowed out through small holes made by the guns. They are not my poems.
N-O-T M-Y P-O-E-M-S.

5
Not only me,
All of us are strangers,
Otherwise how can we explain the city?

6
The poet whom I met one bar in Damascus
…
Was eaten by the wolf.

7
From the start of the body to the limits of desire, the night drops wound by wound, and I take refuge in the light. Women hidden in their jilbabs remind me of the masculinity of the world and I use femininity as a crutch to make my escape. The weariness that flows behind the people in the street pulls me down to the depths, this city does not resemble joy but possesses an ambiguity that afflicts us with fleeting happiness, she does not resemble death but is governed by endings, she is injustice distributed with scandalous fairness, a woman's dream of emancipation, God’s sigh, the head of John the Baptist who runs weeping through our nights, the alliance between the poem and the executioner, between the fresh smell of the walls and the aroma of the alleyways that lead to the beginning, she is Damascus, the never-ending blood wedding, Salome’s dance that rains days on our days, the end that is beginning now, my mother’s prayer moistened with legends, the minaret that brushes the fingers of God, her voice has a taste like the colour of poetry, her body the topography of a sinner, she is Damascus that gave birth to me and fell to a sniper’s bullet, so we were born together, I pull her towards me and the song breaks off, she pulls me towards her so the poem hurts me, ‘O you who believe, do not approach Damascus unless you are drunk for she is inclined to drowsiness’, she has the slaughtered songs, the minutiae of prophecy, the smell of inspiration and we have mysticism, beneath her navel, naked, we are her ungrateful sons who were lost in the north and she is our mother who fed us only on fear so we inherited the Sura of the Poets, she is Damascus, the apple of light, the book of sorrow and the letters of Ibn al’Arabi that have not yet arrived.

Do you know why people die when they are pierced by a bullet?
Because 70% of the human body is made up of water
Just as if you made a hole in a water tank.

Was it a random clash dancing at the head of the alley when I passed
Or was there a sniper watching me and counting my final steps?

Was it a stray bullet
Or was I a stray man even though I’m a third of a century old?

Is it friendly fire?
How can it be
When I’ve never made friends with fire in my life?

Do you think I got in the way of the bullet
Or it got in my way?
So how am I supposed to know when it’s passing and which way it will go?

Is an encounter with a bullet considered a crash in the conventional sense
Like what happens between two cars?
Will my body and my hard bones smash its ribs too
And cause its death?
Or will it survive?

Did it try to avoid me?
Was my body soft?
And did this little thing as small as a mulberry feel female in my maleness?

The sniper aimed at me without bothering to find out that I’m allergic to snipers’ bullets
And it’s an allergy of a most serious kind, and can be fatal.

The sniper didn’t ask my permission before he fired, an obvious example of the lack of civility that has become all too common these days.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

I was exploring the difference between revolution and war when a bullet passed through my body, and extinguished a torch lit by a primary school teacher from Syria acting in cooperation with a Palestinian refugee who had paid with his land to solve anti-Semitism in Europe and been forced to emigrate to a place where he met a woman who was like memories.

It was a wonderful feeling, like eating an ice cream in winter, or having unprotected sex with a woman you don’t know in a city you don’t know under the influence of cocaine, or…

A passerby tells me half of what he wants to tell me so I believe him then we stab each other like two lovers, a woman beckons to me to follow her so I do and we have a child who looks like betrayal, a sniper kills me so I die, the sky falls on the passersby so the tourists flee, the sky falls on the passersby and my heart doesn’t flee, the sky falls upwards so a poet commits collective suicide in his room even though he was alone that evening.

That evening oblivion attacked me unawares, so I bought the memory of a soldier who hadn’t returned from war, and when and when I noticed the flaw in the time, I couldn’t find a place of exile appropriate to my wound so I decided not to die again.

The city is older than the memories, the curse is fenced in by melancholy, time is late for its appointments, walls enclose time with monotony, death looks like my face, the poet leans on a woman in his poem, the general marries my wife, the city vomits its history and I swallow the streets and the crowd swallows me, I, who distribute my blood to strangers, and share a bottle of wine with my solitude, beg you, send my body by express mail, distribute my fingers equally between my friends.

This city is bigger than a poet’s heart and smaller than his poem, but it is big enough for the dead to commit suicide without troubling anyone, for traffic lights to bloom in the suburbs, for a policeman to become part of the solution and the streets a mere background to truth.

That evening, when my heart stumbled, a woman from Damascus took hold of me and taught me the alphabet of her desire, I was lost between God whom the shaykh planted in my heart and God whom I touched in her bed,
that evening,
my mother was the only one who knew I would never return,
my mother was the only one who knew,
my mother was the only,
my mother.

I sold my white days on the black market, and bought a house overlooking the war, and the view was so wonderful that I could not resist its temptation, so my poem deviated from the shaykh’s teachings, and my friends accused me of cutting myself off, I put kohl on my eyes and became more Arab, and drank camel’s milk in a dream and woke up as a poet, I was watching the war like lepers watch people’s eyes, and had arrived at frightening truths about poetry and the white man, about the season of migration to Europe, and about cities that receive tourists in peacetime and mujahidin in wartime, about women who suffer too much in peacetime, and become fuel for the war in wartime.

In a reconstructed city like Berlin lies a secret that everyone knows, which is that the…
No, I will not repeat what is known, but I will tell you something you don’t know: the problem with war is not those who die, but those who remain alive after the war.

It was the most beautiful war I’ve been in in my life, full of metaphors and poetic images, I remember how I used to sweat adrenalin and piss black smoke, how I used to eat my flesh and drink screams, death with his scrawny body leaned on the destruction committed by his poem, and wiped his knife clean of my salt, and the city rubbed my shoes with her evening and the street smiled and the city counted the fingers of my sorrow and dropped them on the road leading to her, death weeps and the city remembers the features of her killer and sends me a stabbing by post, threatening me with happiness, and hangs my heart out on her washing line strung between two memories, and oblivion pulls me towards myself, deeply towards myself, deeply, so my language falls on morning, and balconies fall on songs, headscarves on kisses, back streets on women’s bodies, the details of alleyways on history, the city falls on the cemeteries, dreams fall on the prisons, the poor on joy, and I fall on memory.

When I became a member of the Union of the Dead, my dreams improved and I began to practise yawning freely, and despite the drums of war singing close to my bloated body I had plenty of time to befriend a stray dog, who chose not to eat from my corpse despite his hunger, and was content to sleep by my feet.

A number of people tried to pull me out of the way, but the sniper argued with his gun so they changed their minds, he was an honourable sniper, worked honestly, and didn’t waste time or people.

That little hole,
Remaining after the bullet had passed through,
Emptied me of my contents,
Everything flowed out gently,
Memories,
Names of friends,
Vitamin C,
Wedding songs,
The Arabic dictionary,
The temperature of 37 degrees,
Uric acid,
The poems of Abu Nuwas,
And my blood.

The moment the soul begins to escape through the little gate the bullet has opened, things become clearer, the theory of relativity turns into something self-evident, mathematical equations that used to be vague become a simple matter, the names of classmates we’ve forgotten come back to us, life is suddenly illuminated in perfect detail, the childhood bedroom, mother’s milk, the first trembling orgasm, the streets of the camp, the portrait of Yasser Arafat, the smell of coffee with cardamom inside the house, the sound of the morning call to prayer, Maradona in Mexico in 1986, and you.

Just as if you are eating your beloved’s fingers, or suckling from an electric cable, or being inoculated against shrapnel, just as if you are a memory thief, come, let’s give up poetry, exchange the songs of summer for gauze dressings and harvest poems for surgical thread, leave your kitchen and the children’s bedroom and follow me so that we can drink tea behind the sandbags, the massacre has room for everyone, put your dreams in the shed and give the plants on the balcony plenty of water, for the the discussion with iron may go on for a while, leave behind Rumi, Averroes and Hegel, and bring along Machiavelli and Huntington and Fukuyama, for we need them now, leave behind your laughter, your blue shirt and warm bed, and bring your teeth and nails and hunting knife, and come.

Throw away the Renaissance and bring on the inquisition,
Throw away European civilization and bring on the Kristallnacht,
Throw away socialism and bring on Joseph Stalin,
Throw away Rimbaud’s poems and bring on the slave trade,
Throw away Michel Foucault and bring on the Aids virus,
Throw away Heidegger’s philosophy and bring on the purity of the Aryan race,
Throw away Hemingway’s sun that also rises and bring on the bullet in the head,
Throw away Van Gogh’s starry sky and bring on the severed ear,
Throw away Picasso’s Guernica and bring on the real Guernica with its smell of fresh blood,
We need these things now, we need them to begin the celebration.