Solace: the forgotten last shower fuck.
Not “I got the package, thank you.”
Six words, but not the six
I wanted to hear in Ma’a As-Salamah my dear.
The Kennedy airport flight tower, an easier control.
Go back to the desert’s hot sand dunes and windstorms.
No wonder you can’t talk, you drown in sand mouth.
And they kill each other now.
Darwin’s theory of evolution—
not you, not the sulu bleeding heart,
not the Réunion night heron, not the canarian oystercatcher,
not Queen Arsinoë V.
The last two full summer solstice moons in June,
the 1967 summer of love then. The next seasonal
blue moon is nineteen years away. We will be in the Milky Way.
Habibi Tahhan is under five hundred count Egyptian cotton,
even if he’s dead in Mount Pleasant cemetery.
Even if he says, “If you miss me, visit me there.”
Even if the golden eagle can’t peck the carrion out of my chest.
The pills will never cure. Anna Karenina does not need
the quinine when she sleeps with the count.
I understand this now. You slip down into I need to be alone.
So, my tits are cold.
And I feel the remnants of the remnants of forgotten
jasmine in the whitewashed wust al dar
I ached to see. Now, the Bardo is gone.
And the tourists are dead.
And I want to feel you take care of it all.
Arabic: Ma’a As-Salamah (goodbye)
Habibi (dear)Tahhan (jerk)
wust al dar (courtyard)