I’m slouching past the point of no interruptions the planet dissolving from its patented heat death; I, too, watch this cryogenic state thaw under the stare of the hedge fund, black car shows up and gives them a check, I scream and the sprinklers pulsate in a thousand yards because grass is not inevitable but symptomatic, take my gene pool all is smooth, no regrets, and once this gazebo is swept another will take its place or no one will notice, a frog appears on the fountain’s ledge
29 At the end of first light, the wind of long ago—of betrayed trusts, of uncertain evasive duty and that other dawn in Europe—arises…
30 To leave. My heart was humming with emphatic generosities. To leave… I would arrive sleek and young in this land of mine and I would say to this land whose loam is part of my flesh: “I have wandered for a long time and I am coming back to the deserted hideousness of your sores.” I would come to this land of mine and I would say to it: “Embrace me without fear… And if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak.” And again I would say: “My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair.” And on the way I would say to myself: “And above all, my body as well as my soul beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear…” And behold here I am come home!
(TheAhmedFragments are my translations/adaptations of a series of monologues improvised in 1972/1973 in front of a tape recorder by Ahmed Taraoui, an Algerian worker “born about 1940,” and published under the title Unevied’algérien,est-ceunlivrequelesgensvontlire?[Doesan<
Poems and poetics