satellite prince
and other folks
play nice with the prince or he will bite your yellow fingers. talk about the night and the stars, the way the satellite imitates and pretends to be the sky’s daughter. the hurt lamp burns a layer of the atmosphere, creating a pleasant, pollinated glow from deep within. the plants begin to grow and then burn gently. the fields are made bright by mankind and the fertile soils are aghast. the yellowed fingers carry stain, nicotine, rot, maybe even cowardice. biting it down is inherited. the stain spreads deeper than skin. it settles into the joints, into the quiet spaces between self-sustained malnourishment and collarbone.1
there lies a body in the dark. it keeps a smile in its heart. there lies a body in the shadows of a memory, long forgotten, slowly coming to light. prince, picture a quiet meadow with grasshoppers on grass and poppies on fields, with a grand country home in the middle of it all. picture what you’re used to. picture me in it, doing the laundry and softly singing an indigenous song as i pick the rice. picture a loud plane reaching for the sky interrupting the silence you paid for. and at the same time, while your highest of ness sits up from his home, a fat man sits somewhere above it. he watches. something moves beneath him. a dot, maybe. something small enough to become anything. he looks at a screen all day as the dot pick a dot, picking me. there’s an omen in that—in the fact that people have begun forgetting the human acts. that we are all rice grains, held briefly, before being passed on. in that moment, I can’t help but recall the worship song from long ago, when the jahaleen2 were alive that grandfather used to repeat. they lulled babes to sleep with it.
bells ring the horror, low and thin
a maiden held at the city’s skin
sun-gods murmur—gold to gold
a supple secret never told
iron hymns take down their breath
steel sits quiet, pausing death
throne, be thrown into the dust
unmake the crown, unlearn its trust
be my lady’s lady—stay
unwalled from night, unbound from day
no vow but rest, no law but lie
here where the bright gods dim the sky
bells fall inward, one by one
siege undone, and sleep begun
there’s a breath of freshly blowdried hair and it smells like a burn. it smells like a lie, but the people no longer know how to decipher a smile. the people and i are cliché and chatgpt ma ygaser in making us more mono-morons. it is only before my grandfather died that he told me it was a british hymn that his mother learned from an irish once stationed here. the details get muddled3, but the rhymes remain. my brother is trying to write a book, and i sympathize. the sky rains down on us with objects and rain and bitter wishes of demise. what more can one do in corona-esque, routine-bitten days if not act the protagonist. meanwhile, my pseudonym has a pseudonym, and my works stopped making sense to anyone really. and i know i have devotion for this land, a spoken and unspoken love. a nadba poetry for its mountains, a chawleeb trot for its deserts, a salty-sick seeking for its seas. and yet the land even now only absorbs. it takes in the footsteps, the hoofbeats, the spilled oil and the spilled names. it takes and returns stories, thinner each time, becoming worn down from being translated too many times into something digestible. prince, there is a way the body learns to shrink inside a place it loves. not out of fear (no, fear would be cleaner) but out of accommodation. out of knowing that devotion must sometimes be quiet to survive. that the loudest love is often the first to be disciplined. i am not talking about here or there, you see. i am talking about somewhere in between.
the rice boils over and the flame is forgotten. the fat man presses something (maybe a button, maybe just his thumb against the screen) and somewhere a light turns from warm to surgical. nothing’s intact when the dot stops being a dot. it becomes a decision. it becomes a story told later in a darkness without a body.
I guess this is a draft of something I’m writing. Come back next week to see it more complete, and the week after to see it twisted more.
i began to forget how normal bodies present themselves, how they are not protruding. the above-average lifestyle demands a starving and calorie-counting and using restaurants as background to a social event than an actual participation in a dining experience. it is admirable as much as it is fatal, and the sick minds reason it is a good bargain.
though it is hard to argue that the era of the jahaleen is now not then. there are worshippers of people, not faith. lovers of cynicism, not hope. and there’s so much destruction, more than ever before.
like who is this irishman and why was my great-grandmother acquainted with him and why is my father’s skin glass white and mine pigmented with the sun. it is more confusing when i find through a test that my ancestors are irish, sub-saharan, middle-eastern, persian and south asian. that’s the whole world in my veins. that’s that irish man with that hymn that is stuck in my head like a disease.