SEASIDE HOUSE 290420 – 050520
A. Jameela (1928 – ∞)
I.
You may find yourself
Bulling around in a skeletal battle of field
And you may find yourself
Asking what you’ve been doing for fifty-two years
And you may find yourself
Lost and scared of what you’ve found
And you may find yourself
With legs boned to stray dogs and strayer impulses to blow your brains out
And you may ask yourself
How to bury people alive
And you may ask yourself
Can parents shrug their kids off and die
And you may ask yourself
Do people leave without putting up a fight
And you may ask yourself
How did I get here
II.
A hundred instant-photos
Voice-messages
Missed telephone calls
That three decades old Ogero line
Now who will it be with just an answer machine?
All the numbers she’d cared about
Ahlam
Hanan
Kamel
Leila
Ranya
Mohammad
Hasib
Now fading ink on brittling cartoon skin boxed away with
Wallpaper (Qul huwa Allahu ahad / Qul ‘A’udhu Bi-Rabbin-Nas / Qul ‘A’udhu Bi-Rabbil-Falaq /
Qul ya ayyuhal-Kafiroun)
A corn-popper
A drying machine
A washing machine
A blender with nine lives
A bowl of rotten carots
At least a thousand poems on crispy paper
Many glasses whoses thicknesses varied over almost a hundred years
A balloon pump from 2004
A lot of stupid words – said for caring much more – had stopped spinning in the air
Fallen down
Mashed against the dirty carpet
Somewhere in the darkness
A late taxi driver’s smoke finally goes out.
III.
She never left you
Her bruised-with-asphyxia body wasn’t who you thought
I know it looked blacked out / distinguishably strange / painfully familiar
All wrapped up like a vegetable
Cold like a bench
Unmoved like a stone
Undefended
Left alone
Earthy hairs and a brittling mineral frame
It couldn’t have all felt the same
If she’d said something about it
There’s no sorrow now – merely confusion
‘How will I live back in Square 1 all the way from Square 52
You never taught me how to breathe/eat/walk/speak without you’
B. SEASIDE DREAM-HOUSE NIGHTMARE
I.
It is the Great Depression of the twenty-first century
You put to rest the first big chunk of the tree trunk of your family
The sunlight is now volatile with rage
A thousand crumbling ceilings and agitated rocks mourning
Baby-car-candy-house-pig-shaped clouds disintegrating into shreds
Shreds of apologies and things you never asked or said
Your tree roots are infertile and leafless
The greatest floral limb of your burdened tree heaves to the ground
The ground is an arid plain of alike flowers
Curling into dried petals and dust
The dust suffocating and intolerable – now, unforgivingly gone with the wind
Your once Great Tree now withers
What remains of your dream house garden and piscine crumbles down to
A pool where dogshit accumulates and guano drops false hopes by
Widowed grass / kyphosed / handling all that fatal sadness
Of once beautiful as dwelling revolutions, wild, wild flowers
Now inertic and tranced
The waves that cuddled the softly blanketed coast of your seaside house
Receding/disappearing/betraying what you thought to be a life-long truce
II.
Spring comes too early these days
When melancholy takes root and the incendiary rhetorics wake
Bitter ashes and smoke rising from the ground
The sickly smell of death cuts through a salty blow of wind
Emerging
You try
Straining eyes and ears for the faintest cue
But you can’t tell where it came from
You can’t tell if these things still exist
It must be an SSRI or a hallucinogenic thing doing its one of many things
You can’t remember anymore
There sits your body on a century-old inherited chair
Placed in parallel with the world’s finale; burned assets and fortunes lost
A dull mist spreads onshore
Obliterating the view of long-lost stars beyond the horizon
“Black dogs” lapping at your feet
Chewing on “bastard weeds”
The “ones” no one let in the chalet
The chalet of “your dreams”
Where your every next breath depends on noonday dreams
Of spring-like heavens and honey/rose water streams
Of people you once-only meet
The irreplaceables, the tyrannical, the outrageous
The brash/loud/angry/soft-gazed/beaming
The ugly/grotesque/breathtaking/beautiful
The warm
As you await your call
The telephone never rings
Is there anyone left?
III.
Stray memories pluck on your limbs
Pluck on your nerves
Stirring up your ills
The cigarettes, the trains
The lights, the people, the traffic chains
All caught up in a hurricane
A crisis in a crises catalogue
A terrain battered into a less Earthly terrain
Ideas catching on the action fogging up the sky
As the world storms with a doomsday’s rage
C. The End
It’s only sirens and missing stars
Sparse across mid-afternoon
A terminator countdown begins to loom
Unseen from a next-of-kin
A hundred years of infinity
Now all gone with the wind