The Crocodiles by Youssef Rakha & translated by Robin Moger

Author:Youssef Rakha & translated by Robin Moger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Tahrir Square, 2011, Beat Poets, Alan Ginsburg
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2014-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

THE REVOLUTION FOR REAL

Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the universe how am I chosen

—ALLEN GINSBERG, The Lion for Real

Back from Alexandria via Tanta to find the revolution beneath my bed

And bent double by the light of the bedside lamp, cheek level with the bed boards

I make out millions stampeding and defending themselves with stones, each one a butt end still aglow,

Lifting signs like stamps and carving slogans bigger than their bodies in the parquet; I eavesdrop on their cries.

A last glass of vodka not yet vaporized out my skull from a lay in Alexandria left undone,

Pissed bones popping as I fight back tears, shredding my clothes at the window:

The revolution’s happened, you sons of whores! The revolution’s here for real!

I’d left my girlfriend in Ibn Al Farid Street over the pickle place receiving the old guard, come to pay their respects,

And me missing neither lay nor sea nor her mother’s face widowed just hours before,

Nor my dad, dead a decade back,

Nor a saint round the back of the Shrine café who numbers among his blessings a member bigger than a military policeman’s truncheon,

But rather my ear, soaked in Azareeta because her tears were dripping from my phone.

I splash my clothes with red ink and rush to work to lie down at the boss’s door

The revolution was not with workmates, nor on the Metro nor even in the throats of martyrs resurrected as Central Security hoods.

Drifting through the realms of Egypt Rail how come I couldn’t catch it before it fled to my room?

Weak after a night in the office bathroom I whisper to the tea boy: Without revolution life’s unbearable;

Do you know that Ibn Al Farid said a lover’s death is life and better to kill than part forever?

Sadly, just as there’s no change without slaughter there’s no time without waiting;

Know the angels?

Angels? he asks scornfully, fingering a bald patch like a boulder and, gazing at me with pity, slips me five pounds

A lion with Moleskin I make for a lioness to let her know the revolution’s not in Tahrir Square

And sipping a frappe on the back of a smoothie chasing three double espressos at a branch of Cilantro

I screech over my laptop screen at a teen Catholic: There’s no such thing as penis envy!

From Doqqi to Tahrir many times over in the company of a young poet, from Tanta, too,

Knowing our efforts have been wasted when my girl, bereaved, don’t answer,

And with Zizo keeping a Jordanian girl company the night I got her call, was her sudden misfortune the seal set on our compact?

When she answers at last I persuade my poet friend that there’s a sit-in in my room, for real: We set out unarmed,

And he shifts along behind me on his knees, past the bedside table in Bermudas, a spy, a snooping plant

Crowds of protesters clustering around a stone cake: an old sole

Just like we were

Tanks, matchboxes and F-16s like pins, shameless demagogues,

By night, between the bed boards and the mattress: snipers

We hump

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