I required a large room to walk around in, with a table at which I could write. The chamber was lined with thousands of glazed ceramic tiles painted in blue and red and pink with floral patterns and arabesques, Borromean knots and verses from the Qu’ran, designed to protect my collection of pens and pencils and my person. One hundred windows made from small pieces of stained glass in intricate abstract designs ran the length of the walls. The ceiling was dominated by a central dome one kilometre high, punctuated by sixty windows and surrounded by cascading half-domes, its weight supported by nine massive hexagonal marble columns with Corinthian capitals. A fountain sat beneath the main dome. A gallery held up by four cruciform columns ran across each of the two shorter walls at either end of the chamber above its doors, which were made of teak and decorated with intricate carvings. There was also a minibar carved from white marble. The chamber’s floor was covered with handwoven carpets donated by grateful readers of the poem I wrote before this one.

The far end was occupied by a considerable store of substances in canisters and boxes which, if mixed, would immediately form an explosive mass to flow as hot gases through tubes with flared ends shaped like cornucopia. The tubes were fixed to the tiles and ran lengthwise against the two long walls of the chamber. The ends of the tubes closest to the store were narrow. After undergoing intense rarefaction and cooling, the gases released would explode at a tremendous relative velocity from the other, flared end of the tubes.

Explosions will flow through the cornucopia, which remain stationary, and each object in this description will persist unless it is forced to leave its home by the conveying state.  

He is standing in what was his own back garden as the light fades, studying a photograph of the garden when it was a garden. He is absolutely there, but there is no place for a body to stand inside or to sit or stroll in. 

Roadkill and history: all the other words are under these ones and showers of sand and dust. 

History show

places Masjid Al-Aqsa mosque

complex the cornice of limestone the

square where the prophet ascended

to heaven first qibla and from there

to the martyrs brigade a destructive

angle leads to our tearing up.

Call it Al Quds or feel it

when we run on the broken glass

all of that,

we do it and it’s completely acceptable

and we are aware that in most

paintings the paint isn’t hidden there

it is on the surface like the screaming

now forgive yourself for fainting but 

not for coming to         the 

gesture of refusal or dismissal of

the dead baby bird from whose 

surface scrub the sideview or outline of a

human face, I’m only

knitting this heat for you 

but I saw my life and thought:

I’d like to try that. 

Tell the bad cop about your new poem and

when the bad cop melts, prod the

puddle with a banana and drop

destroyed forms, that

wonderful connection to violence,

free-form takes on the wings of

imbecility watch your words

the margins don’t matter

your lips could be 

cliffs the size of papercuts. 

The point I’m trying to make is

my chain is worth two hundred 

thousand dollars. I’ll often buy

a Rolex then destroy it. I’ve a watch made

entirely from champagne. When I pull up

to the club I wear a blazer and it has pockets.

There is no interruption in the ingress of broken glass and smashed equipment. 

In the photograph, she is standing in what was her own back garden as the light fades, studying a photograph of the garden when it was a garden. She is absolutely there but there is no place for a body to stand inside or to sit or stroll in. Look, you were beautiful, my love. Listen, you were right and you had the eyes of a dove. But my own olive grove has not survived, beloved, and my olive grove did not keep my beloved alive.

The last time I heard it spoken out loud, my name you said, inside the last place for listening in silence, where the human words and voices which arouse nothing also are heard. When you said my name for the last time I heard it and I heard it stop. In the last place for silent listening, we hear no words that make a difference and in the silence of the listening place wherefore don’t you hear me is the last objection.

The manifold doesn’t care. Tirzah sits weeping to hear the shrieks from the pilgrims as they pass the embalmed bodies and remains; so states pass on and remain. I talked to her about everything the poets sang: the angles of the year and the angles of the house and the angles of the gunmen. The newspaper with a picture of a father holding a picture of his daughter. The law killed her and then she was trapped in the apartment and one day the sun dragged them out. There’s a knot of hair in your wine glass. In a place for sweet odours and lovely jealous stupefaction, there is a head with an eye, the small nostrils & the delicate tongue & ears of a labyrinthine intricacy, body cut off where they were laid in a heap of burning ashes and clinkers, the mosques destroyed: so shall we fold the world in two: a pillar of fire by day and a pillar of fire by night. One girl was covered in bloody books. The second one fell into my garden. All that can be annihilated must be annihilated in streams of blood and clouds of gore & view the human harvest. The ovens are prepar’d, the wagons ready; ok, we’re good to go, now we will fold up the world. 

The smell of curdled yoghurt on old gym mats. A soldier saw a fourteen year old boy so she messed him up. A soldier saw a twelve year old girl so he dragged her into the hangar. A fragile deaf boy became a magnet made of putty. We drowned half of him, so we tried to hang up. We let him suck the chair leg but his pants fell off and hit his back. When you see something you haven’t seen before and know it is a part of you; a child’s drawing, endless rows of small windows. Through the dim hall smell of sour milk from old carpet.

Tirzah lay half-sunk in the sand, her lying broken face, her stolen away years dead again, buried alive again. The devastation at noon had to be total upon her body and bones, shattering her face covered with blood but pale as rice, and then we start seeing everything, see inside the walls people who were brought there and thought dead but no, some standing without heads, some without arms, some with wounds on their bodies, some tied up and strangled while eating, some drowned in the water, some burned to death, all the shriveled wives lying on the child-bed, some dead, just as if they slept, some crazy, it was wonderful and everyone was thus dispossessed, cities and villages turned into rocks and sand, dehumanizing jets, & amber & bloodstone. 

And Tirzah, wearing clothes of blood and fire, lay half-submerged in the sand beside them, her broken face stretched out, her budding years stolen, buried alive again and dead, but no longer afraid of the terrors of the night, nor of the terrors of the day. The devastation must be, soaked in blood in the cot just as if they were sleeping in this world transformed, wearing clothes of blood and fire, more and more flames and drops of violet blood.

More fire, we say, let it burn –

I only braid this heat for you

and everyone disappears in the flames

like a candle in a camper van

as soon as

we breathed in the babies

were beheaded because the angle was perfect.

Unable to smile from the waist up

they turn to face

that part of itself which is absent, 

because there’s no place

and no body,

a bird flitting over nothing 

but waste terrain.

He felt he was floating up slowly and wondered if he had been beaten unconscious. Before him, around him, stars gleamed then faded out beyond the airfoils of his wings, and he felt himself swell and become the sky. How long would he remain out cold? Now miles above an ocean without a shore, he didn’t appear to be moving, just hovering high and silently in the troposphere. He sat on the edge of a thermal, legs dangling in empty space and waited there, the infant’s head held between his knees, enjoying the soft but insistent pull of gravity trying to drag them both down into the infinite and black and bloody sea.

The Fawn and Me

I stand on the stone, it’s slippery. One wrong move, and I’ll crash with the rushing water, I’m sure it’s cold. Possibly colder than ice. I watch as the water flies over rocks, admiring how the droplets rise like a ballerina doing a Grande Jete before plummeting down to meet the water again. The sky is dark, the stars are there but barely visible, and the moon was so bright, it was like a torch. Thanks to the moon, I can see the reflection of the light printed on waves as they approach me. I get splashed, just a little bit, and I’m right, it is cold. Colder than ice, just like I thought.

There’s a deer, no a fawn, it looks too small to be a fully grown deer. It had pointy ears, and they flicked whenever there was a particularly loud wave crash or a sudden twig snap. The fawn reminds me of myself as a child. The way I used to wander off and go to places that I shouldn’t have been, the way I approached people with my round nose and curious eyes, and if they moved too quickly I’d scarper. The fawn looks at me and it dips its head as if it recognises me too, perhaps the fawn is me after all. It doesn’t walk over, it looks out at the stream, backing away hastily when water got too close.

Peculiarly, the stream stopped moving, and I began thinking that I paused the world. I couldn’t have though, the clouds were still brushing against the night sky, the stars were still twinkling, and the fawn was still moving – now sniffing at the still water. She looks more confident.

A singular hoof touched the water as the fawn stepped off the rocks, the second it did, there was a yelp and a jump back. It startled me. The second time the fawn stepped forward, it submerged one hoof underwater, then a second one went in, a third one followed, and then a fourth. Despite the chill, the fawn didn’t seem to care about the water reaching its knees.

Suddenly, the water started back up, rushing to run how it was before it stopped. The fawn jumped in shock, but with the thrashing of the stream against the rocks, it struggled to even turn around to try and get back onto the rocks. As it got dragged along the stream, it called out to me, screaming for help. I stepped forward, but I didn’t reach out. It didn’t take long for the fawn to be rushed away, crashing into more and more rocks.

Soon enough, there’s no screaming, there’s no fawn, and the stream ran much softer than it just had. It was cruel, making a baby go through so much fear and pain, its last moments being thrown around and practically drowned.

I look along the stream, watching it pick up with speed every few minutes before it settled down again shortly after. I didn’t know what it meant. Why does it speed up? Why does it slow down? How deep is the stream? Wonder turned into guilt as I thought about the fawn’s lifeless body. How tragic, how cruel. I’m guilty, I didn’t help. The fawn was me, and I didn’t help myself, I let myself drown.

Without thinking twice, I stepped forward, following the fate of the late fawn. For why should I walk away from a stream so aggressive when I let an innocent fawn get swept away? The water is cold, but I feel comforted. The rocks hit me as I’m dragged by the waves, and I feel at home. My nose and throat are invaded by the liquid, but I feel alive.

All the way to my very last breath, I stall on feeling fear, only acceptance. Acceptance being the only feeling I could have to avenge my fawn-self.

Visions of a Stream and Birds

My garden doesn’t have a bench, it doesn’t have a table, nor does it have a set of chairs. There’s grass, which is separated by a path of concrete, and on the outside of that grass there’s flowers that bloom vibrantly in the Summer and die out during Autumn and Winter. Halfway through the garden, there’s a bird bath that’s always clean, and always full – except at Winter when the water freezes over, so there’s no point in doing so.

There’s a picnic blanket sitting on some of the grass, and instead of an assortment of picnic-related items, there’s a jigsaw. A jigsaw that I set out. Any picture on the box has been etched out, so there was no telling what the final product would be until it’s complete.

I start with the end pieces, the ones that have a straight edge, it’s the best starting point. I’m setting them out, one by one, picking up, putting down, taking back. There’s birds sitting in the trees at the end of the garden, and they’re singing a song that’s helping me concentrate, it reminds me that there’s nature out there – not that I forgot – but it’s a pleasant reminder.

Whatever I’m doing, it must be right, because within a few minutes, I have some sort of a picture forming. There’s green, there’s blue, there’s grey. Perhaps there’s trees, it looks that way as there’s brown lines coming from the green, linking together more greenery. I like trees, they’re pretty to look at.

There’s a fence that separates my garden from my neighbour’s, and on that fence sat a cat. A black and white, shorthaired cat. It has round hazel eyes and looked to hold so much life. I watch the cat for a couple of seconds, and it watches my hand hover over the barely done jigsaw. With a gaze full of curiosity, it stays, and I couldn’t be happier.

Within an hour, a quarter of the jigsaw is done, and there’s definitely water, trees, and rocks. I begin brainstorming the end project. A lake, perhaps. It would make sense.

The cat jumps off the fence and into the neighbour’s garden not long after I had seen it, I wasn’t fussed, but I wished it would jump into my garden instead. I kept placing pieces, feeling proud at the speed at which I was going.

A stream.

The final image was a stream. It makes sense now, the rocks, the slim flow of water, the trees that leaned over the water, acting like some sort of umbrella. Which was ironic.

I imagine I’m in the image, I’m sitting in the middle of the stream. I’m on a rock, it’s slippery, but I don’t fall off. I look up to the sky and there’s birds flying in a V formation, they’re beautiful. The sun is bright, and it’s beautiful too. I look into the water, it’s calm, and I can see myself. I look okay, I’m tired and cold. The sun doesn’t help me one bit.

The waves keep crashing against each other, along with the rock I’m on, but no matter how much water comes near me, I never get splashed. I stay dry. There’s no litter in the water, and it’s great to see water so clean. I wonder if the stream with get wider. I wonder if the stream will still be there for years to come, decades even. I wonder if the stream is even real, my head fills with wonderous visions sometimes.

I close my eyes and imagine that I’m a bird, joining their flight in the V shape. The wind is blowing through my hair, I’m flying. My wings flap, but I don’t know where I’m going, where we’re going. The birds fly on as I stop, I’m falling, falling, falling, and I’m back on the picnic blanket.

Now, I wonder, how I’m going to get my completed jigsaw into my house.