mass GRAVES for the DEAD

They hit the chiah area this afternoon during a funeral procession. I watched the thick black smoke rise from Beirut from my balcony up in the mountains. I finished reading Jean Said Makdisi's "Beirut Fragments" today and realised we are reliving the Israeil agression from 1982. My generation could not miss out - could it? I found myself writing the following...





Mass GRAVES for the DEAD
a requiem inside my head.
I recoil as the planes hover overhead
They covet the sky in stealth as we sleep
Barraging the night ad nauseam.
In oblivious sleep, they think we do not see the blood flow,
we do not feel the sky tear,
or smell that brutal smell of insidious warfare.

My head pounds as I think of what to do
I conjure Brave scenarios of myself inflicting resistance and dread to their immanent crusade
Music drowns out their drill and puts me in a short-lived reverie
of untainted clouds where they would never dwell.
Clouds that loom higher than their flying jets
Spaces that Big Brother can not reach or believe –
What is the deal?
You are watching our every move?
As we awake, eat, moan and sleep?
Mr. Bomb can never see inside my head
Or imagine those places I tread.
My private soliloquy
My bequeathed melody
My own night- tune
My din.

I want them Back. I want that dark comfort again. I want to see Beirut again.
I awake every morning with eyes unslept,
With shadow-less dreams half-broken; half dreamt.
Living in a half bemoans my days.
It offends the hours and its movement.
As if it were ripped from me like the rug I was standing on.
and now everything is floating –
uncertain where to land –
in death beds? or in flower-steads?
Or in that strange place we call “home.”
In our creation,
the city is my art and somebody has to come to sell it,
or worse yet, to kill it.

Day 28.

His voice is amplified
Throughout the country
as people turn to their weaponry and bigotry.

I’ll leave the Hard Facts for somebody else.
I’m not interested in retribution.
I am interested in People.
In us, me, you and them.
In a Poetic spectrum that has no space for War.
We’ve all seen people run away,
In dismay, in hopeless fear, and in disarray.
We’ve all seen the flagrant hypocrisy on our TVs
in – between the black-outs and the dirty breeze.
“Terror will never win” they preach and pound into our sets.
“It is wrong” they belch as they Terrorise our minds, hearts, buildings and sweat.
And they say these terrorists will never rise
because they will conquer evil in every guise.

We all wonder why the bombs and weaponry they use to kill us is not terror.
Maybe it is just disguised insecurity
That has no where to rise but in our sky
I wonder what will happen if they were to look in the mirror?
Would they see Hizballah and die?

Is this a fictitious plan to disarm man-to-man?
While the women die and the children cry?
And people live in schools while their houses are reduced to rubble.
We wait as the empire attempts to shuffle and reshuffle us like a deck of fucking playing cards.
Isn’t that the ingenious game they played 2003?
You know, the one where they invaded Iraq, manipulated the American mass and 3 years later , are they still on track?
The King of Diamonds and the ace of Hearts.
Will it surpass this time?
Wasted Energy channeled into hate and carcass.
Racism is rampant in those places that terrorise us, in those places that preach freedom and democracy and finally come to bomb us into a reverie. Remember Beirut under siege in 1982? Lest we forget the pain, my generation gets to share the strain and fight for those who are dying in vain.
Wasted energy kills me.
And they think they’re gods!