against nature – Jalal El-Kadali
May 5, 2020
Huge Golden Sun
The one potato two potato
Of love and death, which is strongest
Which would win
If they had a fight
A lion or a bear
An eagle or a shake
A woman with the figure of a snake
That swallowed a weasel
Biting its own tail
There were also many grouse
Onyx buffalo zebras the first
To take advantage of the young
Shoots tails flapping with pleasure
In the loosening mud the scent
Of the teenager’s curiosity about life
The predator outside
Her enclosure
By now the sun
Was really about as yellow as gold
The sky was as azure as
Cerulean (the pigment painters use when
They want to capture its proper colour)
To say that frogs turn
Into princes is blasphemy
Against Nature; Salvador Dali, however
Was a painter who painted the things in his subconscious
The world of his dreams; at least
He didn’t expect anyone to believe that they were real
At least he wasn’t telling lies to children
The Rule of Threes
Here she lies on the front lawn on her side
Head and knees severed
By the posts of a gate that stands without a fence
As if she were too tired to make it inside
Where identical rooms on either side
The front door of this little bungalow
Each have a light lit
And now she triangulates
One of her staying where she remains horizontal
The other two getting up and going inside to stand
Before each window on the inside looking back
At herself and us, all of us
More numerous and still more identical
And by the time she lies down to sleep inside
And outside gets up to walk backwards through the gate
Her hand finding the latch without looking
And our arms after that
It will have been three thirds as long again
Where the Olympic Torch Once Paused
On its round the world journey
Step by step and as a whole
Just going forward to assess what’s still
In the pipework for things
An imaginary business
Cannibalizing its own market
A reasonably efficient modus for
Moving matter around on a small-medium scale
Enhancing the communication channels
Puts on a virtual gastric band
Under instructions from Hypnos, god of sleep
Complains about the lack of public amenities
Drinking fountains
While the lake in the middle
Perhaps obscenely
Drinks its own fountain
Again it’s uncharted waters
Career Change
I had once, in a good mood, patronised a homeless poet
Who had a technologically quixotic business model
Original hand-written poems by donation
Which if you cared to wait he would compose impromptu
The next time I saw him was at a job interview
On the top floor of the city’s tallest building
His office, like the surrounding ones, was empty
But for a computer terminal and his sleeping bag in the corner
He was minding the office for a friend in Singapore
He said, before subjecting me to a battery of tests
Psychometric, occupational and soft-skills-based
Was he getting paid at last? The evidence was mixed
First, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he rolled
A cigarette with fingers sooty from butts, then opening
A window, took the coins he had collected selling poems
And dropped them onto people’s heads, crying
“The meters keep on moving and
I can’t seem to remember where I parked!”
Astral Projection
First the fine detail, nothing else, that all
Else borrows its glamour from
Then mockery of the ragged poor by
The indescribably rich
And finding it funny in your own rags
Just a bunch of obscure concepts
Failed references, bits of gristle
Going it knows not where, failing
As though one were made
Immortal in a youthful body
To be protected at all costs from injury
The only alternative being
Rank growth of bones well into maturity
Bursting out like canes
Out of your body everything looks
The same but different: proof
Of veridical experience
Then you return and everything’s
Just the same, reportedly
The New Circumcision
I.
The birth of my second penis
Is now occurring
Thanks to years of astral fucking
Dry throated clucking
At every theoretical temptation
The foreskin of my entire
Gross body now worn away
And what is revealed is smaller
At first, but its growth is annular
Exponential and unending
II.
It was far otherwise for the criminal
Who dressed as a woman to make his escape
He lived on the lam for years, hiding his great hands
Fooling everyone except the detective
Who never quit
Finally to escape detection
After tangling with a razor wire fence
He underwent reassignment surgery
So that the two of them finally met, fell in love
Got married and had a baby