Zaid

Halt breaths,
Choke air escaping into lungs,
Stitch shut,
Mouths that dare to pry open, leave them hung.

Lend me your nights into one thousand and one Arabian minutes,
Take leave of reality that you indulge in and inhale,
Lend me gaping minds aspread, lubricated and hungry,
Take leave of your dreaming slumber into my tale,
Lend me moments of awakening into curtained lives,
Take leave of moulding, wretched pleasures and senses stale.

Into the life of Zaid now dying lays he,
Into glands and tears of crying me,
The story of decay over many years,
Let the words ring in, take part your ears.

Enter the liar's lair, abandon hope,
All ye who enter here, with your heads high,
Enter captive now, and map nay your way,
All ye who enter here, never will you die.

Leaving sheathed thin skin unbled,
The sword pierces into Zaid's veins,
Lay euphorically, in a half-trance of death,
One that feels no desire nor regret nor pain,
Screaming his own name,
'Zaid is dead,
Zaid is dead.'

And on the carcass's bed sat maps and words of history,
Where his soul would exit from where he spoke and make its way,
Through catacombs, mausoleums and with wind that sways,
Tree-tops grass-lands and mast-held sails of ship lining sea,
Across burning acres of acorn and white-tips flew he,
Where strings from suns and stars led his soul forth,
West and East traveled my sight with his, South and North.

Nonlinear the events unfold without memory,
Of date or place or names untold or spoken with hurry,
For his mind short-lived the horror he saw before him,
Incoherently spoken of mass-graves and shredders grim.

Leaving sheathed thick skin gaping,
The sword pierces into Zaid's chest,
Lay ecstatically, in a semi-trance of death,
One that feels nothingness, no worse nor best,
Screaming his own name,
'Zaid is dead,
Zaid is dead.'

At the corners of his lips collected wisdom,
With teaching of prophets and kings spat,
As if learned and conversed with them,
Stunned next to his body I sat,
بألم في صدري و قلم بحجري،
و نقشت له رايات الأموات.

Roam your flat earth ignorant, arms hanging,
The torch that lights the path ahead falls without a flame,
Burn arms that don’t hang and reach up to sky,
Burn souls that ridicule the name of your god that claims:
"Beneath my flat earth, dare you challenge, you'll fry."

Then took me on journeys his borrowed sight,
With no roads or sail, or wings of flight,
Timeless traveling worlds forgotten and known,
With land of fire and sky of stone.

Once, realize one river dividing their faith,
Once upon a time in the brightest land of whitest man,
There fell crucified a great fire from the sky,
Flaming the rise of the land's hungriest clan,
Their score-board filling from end to end,
With hung penises, jawless skulls and bone,
Their wading feet grew not tedious,
Their foretold future is to roam our land alone.
Machiavellian glory they lust for,
Cremate the deaf, dumb and blind,
Handicapped are now the fuel burnt,
Diseased and wounded left behind.
Soil tongued clean by the slaves alive,
With their minds and bodies leashed,
And there rose empires sky-scraping,
On shoulders of those off whom they leeched,
And there rose stench of blood from the crown,
Under which's shadow colors of joy bleached,
Guilt and grief synonymless with their names,
In the shadow of tyranny, the clouds they reached.

One is it or countless sacrifices their souls need make,
To break bonds between metal chains holding them still?
Drops or torrents of blood streaming forward is it,
Meant to release agony engraved upon and against their will?
'Kill, kill!'
Chanting droves of booted feet storm,
'Kill, kill!'
Shot, hanged or exploding death, in every form.

Those forms of death where we landed next,
Where spirits screeching never come to rest,
And reapers roam with laughter orgasming,
Celebrated is pain here, in the constant doom-fest.

With holy pain of anxiety eating at his bone he sat strapped,
The historic twenty-minute, legend of the slayer Gee Jon,
Watching cyanide crystals fall into his sulfuric acid vaporizing,
Watching his gas of death form he foamed and held on,
His oxygenless tissue convulsing in his last dance without breaths,
Watching every sphincter release mad boiling sweat, tears, shit, vomit, saliva and sperms, His execution was done.

I'll swallow electrocution, by the decade,
Sights, sounds and smell become a thing of the past,
I am your mercy, or merciless indifference,
Sinister and antiseptic, my shadow I cast.
Relaxant, Thiopental, Sodium,
Paralyzer, Bromide, Pancoronium,
Killer, Chloride, Potassium,
Cardiac arrest, sucks into the vacuum.

Hang like dogs ye who don't fight like men,
Let the ropes of Captain William Kidd snap,
Now slathered in tar, in chains, over Thames,
Captain John Rackham falls into the trap,
And others hang undead, swinging with no names.

Decapitation by machine,
Only for the humane,
Heads roll, death toll,
Is the human sane?

Learnt best at eye's pleasure,
The sadistic leisure, here,
Let the prophecy be :

" Hell is a tale,
Hell is a myth,
Lead claustrophobic,
Robotic monotonic marching behind,
Lead idiotic barking silent protest blind,
Into labyrinth."

And why not Zaid be your prophet or savior?
Why not he be your foretelling Nostradamus?
Or enlightened one with visions and deities countless,
Mythical salamander from your fires leaping,
He saved, he saving, he almighty, gracious.

Yaldabaoth?
I call on you, from your darkest of thrones rise,
My chaos born and leashed with this umbilical cord,
I call on you, for aid and for advice,
My chaos runs amuck, why sheath your sword?

يالدابوث؟
أين أنت من ألمي, أين أنت من عذاب؟
أين أنت من يقين أذيبه بدمع عيناي؟
سلختني سياط من أسئلة ما لها من مجيب،
أين أنت من أيماني, ما أخفاك عن مرساي؟

Yaldabaoth?
Leave your children, leave them roam,
Drink away my waves, my foam.

Yaldabaoth, I'll scream,
I'll summon the unconceived,
In you I believe, yet,
Rain of lead hails down on land thirsty,
As you masochistically bleed your military blunders,
Mop floors dropped upon in a frenzy of war,
I feed on the blood of your ejaculating funders,
And quake your earth shall when I curse upon you,
And terror strike bone when my vengeance thunders.

Hand in hand, we land in holy earth of mirth lost, long before we reached,
Hand after hand, we dig through sand pressed by hooves and wheels and feet.

Antelope statant,
Griffin passant,
Tyger rampant,
Lion crouchant gardant,
Wolf salient and Wyvern,
In armor clad from head to toe,
Be you, friend or foe,
On my shield, you'll burn.

There flags with staves rose at tops,
Knights with erections around John the King,
Illiterate sealed and impotently he flops,
Disaster signed, with Langton's blessing,
Barons' choice now spits back at their faces,
On King John's rod, they are sucking.

Three days after Christmas at the doors with battle-axes they arrived,
Four armored knights rode post-haste to Canterbury to kill who opposed,
Archbishop Becket begged by monks 'In the cathedral take sanctuary.',
Refused, he yet hearing voices singing evening service, his duty to attend,
Struck on the head Becket was killed, no king attempts to make amends,
Yet the golden rule survived.

Proclaim – of religion – your state,
And spawn for centuries you're right to hate,
Torpedo your compassion, Carve on a slate,
"Liberty raped twice,
Off the shores of Egypt,
In six days universes made,
And in six, men fled like mice."

Spices flavored our air,
Off docks and rocky, red shores,
Surrendering to disease we walked,
Driven by cotton-heaps and caravans of whores,

It is real now the tumor growing within, and without,
Seed, now sent off to spawn sour melons in your farms,
Real contaminated water-wells and cottonless Nile banks,
And you become the nectar where the wasps feed with no harm,
End of era of golden unsettling sun and other metaphor rank,
Lepers in leather, amongst you, with steel of shields and arms.

That same path, now walked by Patrick of Denmark,
Terrinon, Islamic, Christian, and Jewish he barked,
Silent to his stealth secret they were,
And Silent I was to him more,
Commodore's seventh land where he resided,
And between my wings lie his head,
Aging centuries turning over corpses of the half-dead,
In minutes, Patrick of Denmark atop roofs of Beirut,
Became ashes, burnt to the root.


ثقل الأرض على كاهليك،
منك هرب الموت و إليك،
كل من زار الخوف مال عليك،
على لحمي و على صبرك اقتات!
من شجاع؟
من حارب الموت و مات؟
أم من حمل النعش و لم يبك الرفات؟
In hospitals hunt,
For memories alive,
Answers blunt,
More bodies arrive.

عبثيّة حياة عبثت بنا لما نهاية،
عبثيّة قوّاد قوات،
قادونا لنهاية الحكاية.

Where schools of bass whales swam,
Behind concrete and steel of dam,
Drowned reincarnated Zaid and on he dreamt,
Of secrets of Beirut those lost and kept,
In his uniform of formal military man,
Stepped forward Zaid, under bullet-ban,
Where shreds shared heat with flame around,
With a shell missing his head, he, to the ground,
Embraced in her, together eternally bound.

March of a million man,
March of a billion let them fall,
Temples, statues standing tall,
Soon bowing in worship to a mall.
With it's towers for tolling bells,
Sex and religion both sell,
But with your options what's best of all,
A presidential suite in five-star hell.

In chrome and glass and silver and whitening gold,
Let Zaid draw blood and inject, let Zaid share your plague,
Staged battles and traps rigged to hold captive your will,
The motives driving this lust buried in you remain vague,
Still your sweat rivers flow forth, between Palestine's hills,
Dead Sea,
Dead Zaid,
You and me,
He betrayed.

We crashed down, soundless upon dawn or day,
To his ears I sung motionless, yet the plants swayed,
With love and life and us he toyed,
He played.
"Zaid,
Zaid."

Abduct long-lost innocence here plays,
Street-corners, cornered in sandboxes scattered,
Duct-tape shut small mouths that can't pronounce,
Love left it young, tender, love left it battered.

And he lay squirming, with our souls in place,
His eyes stitched with torment shut, and his heart at a pace,
Penduluming between life and death, shivering,
His final fall now, and my heart shriveling,
Nothing is left to be felt,
Nothing is left to be lived,
Heaving into and out of grasp,
Torn,
Leaving out of and entering life,
Born, elsewhere,
Nothing is left to be felt,
Nothing is left to be lived,
And the sword dropped there.