from Tales of a Severed Head

Third tale

I

See this love determined to turn loose spiders and prosecutions on the ceiling of forgetfulness. Alone I, woman of ebony heart and body given to the dark cries inside bottomless coffers where the hell of my name caws, where I am Emerald my green flames my cold hate and the whole horde of my dreams summed up on a scrap of paper where I am a freed slave liberated from royal courts and crowns henceforth free to find paid work for the price of a candlelit evening clandestine and anonymous, to be able, through white pages’ and carbon paper’s submission to type my new master’s knowledge my boss and lord till my scarlet nails wear down his assignations with death the business dinners where the eternal-absent-wife is replaced by the virgin-high-school-girl. A Martini for you, kid so these caresses will be less furtive and love will last as long as a spurt of sperm on your gazelle thigh golden sashes tightening on your hips in a noose of lunar solitude.

I alone forever woman of ebony who wished to cross bubbles abscesses and battles to dissolve misunderstandings who wished to find the right words to locate my body for you            in this sewer my tattered body in the maze of an accursed story in an accursed palace at the heart of a petrified country, kingdom of cloisters and walled gardens where, dripping and luxuriant carnivorous flora grow, stems lengthened by porn videos and petrodollars by a sun declared the official cause of all disasters from drought and water rationing, to speech movements to sunstroke-riots which explode above howling cities caught off-guard the blood-lust of carnivorous birds in flocks sowing terror and children’s corpses through the medinas coming back to pillage those same corpses so that History ah, History…

Petrified country where Sharayar and genies daylight allies in total repression drive back, to take refuge in fear in cups of tea in football my whole famished people.

Like Dinazarde we were witnesses silent and complicit         of our own death of our bodies’ division into little stars whinnying with pleasure our heads thrown to the dogs: another bone to gnaw and nothing more.

Enough has been said about my murdered                 people no prayer rises to my lips no tear dry well

All my walls crack open from all the hoarded centuries and identical dynasties. Alone and woman of ebony         eternally I am the curve of centuries pierced in search of clear water with which to wash your feet,            Sheherezade before burying your henna-covered hands their jewels with them and          their squalid songs            of freed slaves.

II

Ah, how often she dreamed of nocturnal oceans bringing the taste of blood and salt          back to our throats dreamed as if she knew all the words to assemble so that a door would open a people arise

and the sea finally flood            into our heads’ lit coals where there is so little space so that a woman keeps shouting a door keeps closing on a man being tortured a boy being raped dreamed of all the seas enraged as if a red continent would thrust up amidst the seas as if this continent could light up              all the mirrors those squares of sorrow those lakes and once and for all wring the neck

of the mangy serpent of death the Sultan of Abscesses visibly reptile and seductive —centuries of seduction and woven ruses in his triangular         subtle and murderous head— Ah, how often she dreamed of nocturnal oceans at last to throw herself in            that final infinity              of No, the country before death the absolute dryness            of livid spaces.