was not sun was dust and wind. His bodyguards were
Long Gulad, The Hammal, End of Time.
They sang him Belwos, fed him holcus for his colic,
millet beer and boiled barks.
If
the nomads took him
he would learn phallotomy, his penis gone
for scholarship among the wives in someone's tent.
Bedu lurked about his camp and hurled stones.
They called him Old Woman, Chief of Zayla, Painted Man.
They called him Turk
&
Priest
&
Pilgrim-Merchant,
Banyan, and Calamity Sent Down from God.
He gave up his disguise and forged a letter from the
Aden consul introducing him as an ambassador
and dressed up in his captain's uniform with
epaulets and sword. He marched until he saw the walls
no white man ever breached, the gate he thought
he'd walk through chanting poems. Back in Zayla
they proclaimed him dead. Back in London
Karl Marx
&
Tennyson sat down to read his Mecca Haj.
The Amir asked him if he'd come to buy Harar.
Jl.
Arthur Rimbaud,
I886-I888
And was Harar for Sale? And were Le Voyant's visions
null and void? Sol de. He'd left behind what time
nor science had acknowledged, drowned his book of magic
and returned to earth. And one must enter splendid cities
absolutely modern after all. Among the packs
of one-eyed mangy dogs. And with a taste for soil
&
stone.
His I was other and another still. His ear once made
him brass and like a bugle he had blown.
A scent of wood, he'd found himself a broken violin.
