Soft-Serve Staircase – Jalal El-Kadali
November 13, 2020
Egrets
In the park discussing intellectual property law
As it pertains to fashion, spied on
From behind an arrow slit in a castle ruin
Ah! Go back in time to instruct yourself
In being just yourself
The independent candidate
In the Sunday clothes of the irreligious
And, mother, go back to hospital
With your baby with the massive hands
Balled up like twin heads, they were, coming out
And have him again, only this time normal
Simply Unsustainable
One hundred head of cattle to make a single steak
Warehouses full of grain regenerated
In phoenix fire
To be sold back to the people who grew it
In time of famine, at an exorbitant profit
To cover the cost of industrialisation
Cars and jets knowingly sold that would catch fire
As if purposively in a lethal firework display
So I hitched a ride on that phoenix’s wing
Superfluous to list all the things in my new surroundings
That did not comport with the maxims whereby
I choose to live my life
In a record breaking winter
Myriad spokes of an umbrella
Providing shelter under a single point
At least for a while
My finger froze to an ashtray
And came away smoking
Though I enjoyed no amorous success
I at least grew more confident with the food
Too confident, it turned out, given
My rudimentary acquaintance with the language
“O,” or something like it, was coincidentally
For octopus: a terrestrial species found
In certain specialised wet markets
Where the custom was to do battle hand-to-tentacle
And if victorious, to eat the vanquished
The vendor getting paid from ticket sales
I survived the encounter somehow, but was withdrawn
As ambassador and abandoned there
The Integral Accident
The wings are not part of the bird
You cut them off and where is the bird
There, next to its wings and all the more a bird
For being separated from their accident and yet
By accepting the necessity of transportation
We accept the necessity of accidents
A yearly road toll, a freak mid-air collision
Between two aircraft when the controller falls asleep
And because it is not time for this tragedy
According to those stars wrapped up in obscurity
The wings of themselves adjust the plane’s course
Its destiny that of a perverse space rocket
Atmospherically diminished as meteorically
It redounds back upon the planet that launched it
Dwindling to the size of a crushed cigarette
To be scavenged in some city park
Derisory fate for the breath of life with which
It was invested, folding and dipping or soaring
At the final moment, so that a bemused pair of pilots
Are afterwards feted
The religious one kissing his St Christopher medal
Belated Fire Warning
The furnace under the furniture
The tiers of potted plants
A change table for the unbaptised infants
Washed up on the far shore of a house
The bathroom that succumbs to moisture
That is another kind of fire
Is fitted with a gantry
For hefting survivors stiff as pylons
Congratulations! You Have Won
I woke up beside your mother
One morning when the postman brought her a cheque
For a million dollars, and watched while she did
Her makeup, put on her Sunday dress
And phoned a cab to take her to the bank
But she was on the company’s blacklist
And kept pace with her on the way back home, on foot
The day heating up and causing a tardy dew
To condense between the fine painted hairs
On her scarlet upper lip
That philtrum the cutting from which your face
Is always wont to sprout for me
Expostulating in Hungarian
And before I could stop her, by way of consolation
And because she was hungry, your mother snatched
A croissant from a delivery tray
To be chased off like a seagull
Cultured pearls flapping
Against the bosom that had suckled you
And that yet suckles my memory of you, so that
Beside your mother in your absence
Invisible, for the time being, to her
We were once more together, you and I
I Went to the Library
And signed my name in a book by the desk
It was in a school from which no escape was possible
And where the children, fully grown, show the teachers around
The whole thing one great spiral staircase
In the form of a soft-serve cone
Melting in the heat from ubiquitous windows
Then down a corridor of glass where the books
Were about things one could do for oneself
Like restarting an art movement that stalled
A century ago
Still beneath
Sallow laminate the passage held
Some meaning; on one side of the mezzanine
Below lay a food court at the foot
Of a tireless escalator, an illuminated fountain
At its centre, while three elevators
Gave access to the departments of higher learning
With mathematics, inaccessible to most, up top
And over the small balcony outside the dean’s door
An oval was set up for track and field
But the long jump in which I competed with myself
Was the main event, as I leapt from the balcony
Into the green that turned out to be wet
And forgiving
Then everything I’d learned
In that library was inverted, as a new up
A new north made itself known
The deeper I swam, letting out the final air
From my lungs, blood fizzing
As I struck the ocean’s unyielding bed
This Bed of People
You had little interest in landscapes
And anyway the ones surrounding you
Were all cityscapes upon which ruinous rent
Was charged by the glance
You tried still lives but all of them had
Headache-inducing connotations
And people, moreover, kept getting in your way
The slogans on their T-shirts often
Uncomfortably similar in content
To your own intimate thoughts
You had to cut some of them down to fit
But that was no more horrific than the way
Their brows would collapse in an avalanche
Whenever you forgot yourself enough
To speak to them in earnest
Then one of their number
Revealed herself by signs
As unmistakable as ineffable to be
None other than that spectral compagnonne
Beside you always in her own absence
Whereupon she grew to human size
And shared your bed until through the pair of you
Some little people germinated, soon
Assuming the size of trees