The Human Condition by Paul Christensen

Author:Paul Christensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wings Press
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

EVEN THE FORSAKEN WORLD IS HOME

“Moustache,” someone says in the souk.

A thin, wedge-faced man stares back

when I turn to smile. His face unwrinkles

into a greeting. It happens several times

a day in these dry coastal towns along

the Atlantic shore. Morocco’s men

milling in sandals and loose robes

under a dense foliage of women’s hijabs

and jelabas, each assessing the offense

of my moustache – forbidden to them.

At Agadir, the souk is its own dense

city under corrugated tin, tarps,

cardboard patches, ropes holding

the perforated night three feet above us.

Inland toward the desert, Taroudant’s

adobe fortress rises like a scab

against the blue-veined sky.

No one can count the times

invaders leveled it, massacred the women,

set fire to the medina and looted until their arms

could hoist no more. Easy pickings

in this crumbling flat land, so like July

in Taos, with the sky peeling

along the east horizon. “Moustache,”

whispered against me, as I turn

to open my smile like a tattered umbrella.

A feeble glance into the accuser’s soul

reassures me he is inextricable from all the rest.

Islam’s concrete accumulates in the mind,

like the towering gray villas poured

into being from cement trucks, for tourists

to buy as cheap havens from the west.

A hundred thousand heads of Allah

look down at us, each with a hundred-thousand eyes.

We cannot move without their unblinking

censure, an all-accusing blaze of indignation.

The hills are scraped into towns, with a minaret

to anchor the dissolving world. A voice

as dark as coffee bursts from loud speakers

at dusk, calling dusty men to prayer.

Trust no one, believe in nothing.

Fear thieves, politicians, fat businessmen

behind their tinted windows.

In the sweaty prayer hall

men grovel in the filth of their mortality,

aching to kiss the gown of an unreachable god.

The mind goes dark in an ecstasy of want.

as day welds the hours into crowded streets.

The wild hashish of monotony

lifts each cracked heart up

to the tainted, unforgiving mid-day air.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.