Good Morning Scarface


I, K. Silem Mohammad, do solemnly decline
To declare any or all contact with nature poets
In the area immediately surrounding the airport
And / or its Burberry flying squirrel displays.
My mind has been occupied not with these troubling times,
Which do perturb beyond reckoning
The millipede-like centurions who congregate here,
But with these auspicious spaces, within which
Quixotic sand-witches circle and spit. Their principle,
A brutal fakir, appears humbly to me in my dream,
His weapon concealed. —How sits it in Auschwitz,
O Saudi-born muskrat, I ask him, careful not to accept
The scented wafer from his fingers. My wife feels he is collegial,
And I concur.

Finding nothing to say, he pulls back
Into his obliterated habitat. Pursuing him there,
I find an airtight pocket of alibis, but no Columbine
Yearbook, no fantasy of malignant liver cells
Materializing into a diplomatic non-event.
—Who would call you Old Santa Claus? Still no answer.
Now he fades in the farthest blackness of the tunnel
That floods with light when I awake, out of the one dream
Into a conundrum, for there before me, in my father's slippers,
Looms the colluder. —Put your chip in my necktie.
Predatorily, you will suffice. I have sanctions
Awaiting sanctions, and will not develop a motive
So long as you are the public servant and I
Am the placid stander-by.

  Call me up and we'll talk turkey.
He raised his voice most petulantly,
And refused to vaporize as desired.
Everyone got scared of our homemade device
And ran through the parking garage screaming.
The words from the watchful come early and often:
—What shadow offends us? What specter is coughing?
What forehead is that in the ember-light nodding?
Who goes there? —Osama bin Laden.

Some say fire and some say ice; I say fire and ice
And digital cable. I say every iconoclast has his price.