They’re wrinkles
On the face of history.
History is a tired woman.
History stands by the side of the road,
Her cheap necklaces toll for you.

These old scars,
Rock against people,
Time against more time,
Cannot be kissed away.

After my body
Has stopped complaining
At the end of the rope,
After your feet enter the slippers
Brought to you by another woman,
The rock will still be telling
The same story to itself.
The ending never changes.

Implacable but steady,
The city never stops blushing,
As if it has an amusing secret.

I think it’s adding footsteps
To its scrapbook of desecrations.

No one righteous,
And no one to blame.
We have forgotten its loves
And big and little deaths,
And it “forgets” to bless us on our way.

Then I washed my hair,
Made myself prettier than even Fadi can,
Lay across our bed with my feet pointing east,
Hands across the body
Where everything began.

We made them up inside our heads,
Inside this bed.

Now you’re walking down the road,
Your top buttons unbuttoned,
Your tie and face askew.

Now you can’t enter.
Now.

Forgive me my cowardice,
My poppy mouth,
That bent down
Searching out a kiss.
I’ve been rewarded richly for this.
I have the freedom
Only loneliness can affix
Like a medal to breasts run dry.

Tablecloth violated
By sweet little drops
And spills.

Until the moment
Of no more,
No more.

A simmering,
Singing tongue
Resting behind the teeth.

Then it goes,
And the lights
Are dimmed in the restaurant.

The waitress
Slides out out of her pump
And inspects her tired toes.

The cook rubs his forehead
Where the hairnet
Hugged him too tightly.

The sleeping dumpster
Quietly digests
The remains of the night.

The way back is long,
Through puddles and cobblestone.
The way back is so long.

A life that’s a feast fit for a troll,
A grain of sand that’s bursting with the world,
- All the things you say you want.

Don’t hurry, love, to claim the throne,
The last son always gets it anyway.
Don’t eat the apple with too-shiny skin,
Or strain to see a glimpse of goddess-flesh.

Some joys we need protection from and more.

The back of your head contains sweetness I’m afraid will spill,
I’m always chasing it in a crowd.
It’s like a high a young, toothless woman mumbles about,
When she accepts an offer of a cigarette and remembers better days.

She has never known sheets so white,
She will envy me as I’m flying toward you.
I have given her another gift – an empty beer bottle
That joins others in a clinking chorus in her bag.

I’ve stained the rim with lipstick I mark you with,
The ghost of a kiss is all that’s acceptable here.
You kiss me with your eyes in the street,
And other men I walk by do much more.

I would like to take all these people and wring them out;
Or make their eyes boil and burst in their heads.
They will run down like egg-whites, their fake tears,
For things they don’t know enough to be sorry for.

They’re lucky I don’t track dirt to my bed.
They’re lucky my curses are like matted fur.

I will shake my futile fist
Or I will rip my yellow hair;
It won’t matter, it won’t come,
Once it is no longer there.

Someone shuffled in the night
Like a clumsy incubus.
Overturning this and that,
Chasing cats under the bed.

I will find a yellow tooth
Stranded in a smiling wound;
It’s too sweet and it’s too trite,
It was pleading for a bite.

It’s a long way to travel -
From a hospital drop-off lane in Gaza or Kinglake
Through fiber optic cable.

They’re shuffling their feet
On someone’s living room threshold.
They’re ruthlessly beating dust out of their jackets,
And sniffing the cooking,
Wondering if lemon juice will do it.

Ya Allah, they are tired.
Their blisters are scabbing over.
Their push-up bras spoon up rivulets of sweat
Under the laving lights
Of some studio or another,
Like goblets of wire and lace.

They are standing near the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour,
Considering how a bullet
Could be so thoughtless
As to rip a rabbit hole through the sidewalk
And beckon to their daughter.

It’s not their daughter,
What the winter soil fell casually pregnant with.

People in the news
Are wrapped in the yellow of taxis
Speeding away from the curb.
Wrapped in a baby blanket
Slash
Burial shroud.

They are asking the impossible.
They should really just go back
To shooting cute animals (on camera, habibti!)
In their backyards.
They should win lotteries and tennis sets,
Not a visit from a couple police officers,
Their faces like twin Vermeers in the porchlight
At one a.m.

They howl for you to join their ranks
Like zombies
From a shopping mall parking lot.

They are perniciously beautiful
Like meteors fizzling.
You want to be among them,
In the airlessness, above everything you’ll ever know,
Slamming into the waiting arms of the atmosphere.

They are immortal,
Blood and starlight in their hair.
They travel first-class on interstellar waves
And the muscular backs of cosmic ghosts,
When the Sun has already swallowed the chattering Earth.

I have weathered and leathered my hide,
I’m just a wraith now, love,
Wraiths don’t bite.
My teeth are glittering in a glass
Like jewels from a woman’s neck.

God, how I hate the blood in this town,
How pale it looks, how thick it runs,
Like cream of tomato stoppering a throbbing vein.
Not that I would know.

I cannot will my smoky fingers back to flesh,
I’m hypnotized by my night-light and video games.
The prayer is calling, the cock is crowing,
But I’m going outside and lighting a cigarette.

I squint at the dark through eyes you kiss.

Raise a cross above your head,
So I scream and writhe on the floor.
It’s always the men in the business suits
You must watch out for.
Oh do I ever know.

My rare rose cries petals for you,
And my body of air
Weeps wool and cashmere,
Like a coat rack in a good restaurant.

It’s all I could ever do -
Lie awake afterward and watch over you.
A car passing, a dog’s bark,
In the darkest patch of night – a stray star.

Flowers blooming in the water
In a pail for the dead.

Strange these flowers,
Like limp hands;
Rubied like
Old drying wounds.

When the blood coagulates
There will be no more rose water
Running over her dead daughter
And escaping in the drain.

Ladies keep their fingers clean
And live to see other days;
Or else Father chops them off
One by one
And pumps the juice.

Juiced the hairy mouths of judges,
Juiced the gadflies on the slab.

Mother, Father
Wash away their daughter.

“Never look back,” Omar said,
But what if looking forward is not an option either?
The only thing you see there
Is the dust beneath your feet.

Anyway, Omar, you still married some idiot:
Some woman who is like a wormhole
Rotating slowly in all dimensions,
Like a blind spider in a web,
Hatching.

Why should I listen to you?

Here I have my shops and tea at dusk.
I have tried one hundred kinds of firming cream,
One hundred pairs of iron shoes,
One hundred loaves of iron bread.

I have known pain as magnificent as yours.

I just want a little bit of peace, Omar,
Some music and hair grease, Omar.
Some boy who catches my eye
In a car on the bridge in purring Ramadan traffic
With no desire to know how to unscrew these bolts
And take me apart.