An old man

Here is a street where

the dead are walking

on their broken eyelashes.

All the answers here

flee to alienation,

burrowing as mice,

soaked in the urine of the sky.

All streets are covered with needs.

The sands of the desert of Desire

are falling from the top,

splitting them into half-statues,

each half walking in different directions.

They are all dressed in one uniform,

and an old man holds ninety years above his forehead

or ninety centuries.

More lame, wrinkled, and dark,

He cannot be reassured about anything.

With one leg he jumps – doesn’t sleep –

from cage to cage.

His head is rolling in front of him.

His head is chased by a pack of dogs.

He used to sell newspapers stained

with the mucus of disaster.

He walks, and then he comes back.

There are liquid paths hanging from his wooden nose,

where he collects knives to build his poems,

and drink from the sweat of bared feet,

to draw hordes of white collars

re-constructing the vanishing pyramids.

It was enough for him to die as a child,

before the debris of needs surprised him.

He was born old.

He knew that the journey was the cracks of his hunger.

He came suppressed to throw in the shadows.

and he knew that all eyes came to be extinguished

when it was sold,

and he knew that he had a long hand

to pick up his strewn body from the cold air.

He had some numbing habits;

for example: he blows through his closed mouth,

and a red smoke emerges from his ears,

and it tames the implanted shiver that’s in the air.

As a sweat of fire, he remodels it

– and –

he rushes to collect the remains of the cigarettes

that escaped from the burners.

There is a giant life on

the bottom.

A life without shadow.

At the bottom you are a bear

filled with abstraction nudity.

Without any collusion,

then you will be without skin,

and you will not be stigmatized as a human being.

You will be something else, a free body

like a fish dancing on embers.

Perihelion removes you from the existing system,

from the dominant structure.

Your constitution will become only your dying breaths.

Only you will be a prisoner

of the vast shades of laziness.

You will be a snake in a dark hole.

You will be staring gently at the possibility that

nothing will happen.

Where war, or life was aimless activity,

and creeping here.

Except that the dust will recycle you.

You old man; YOU will die old, and

another old man will be reborn.

A burst of flame will force him to side with

the harmony of its ignition.

Again, he will collect the remains of the defeats

from the patios of the crucified.

Frequently, the smoother slings of steel whips

will come out from the old man’s head,

attached to the chest of his past,

then slaps flow into a river towards

the drowsy hollow.

It will hang on the chest of his past,

and then blows will flow into a river

towards drowsiness.

But you can still stab yourself

and bleed unfortunate poems.

No, yes, no!

You still can burn with your brush

the tents of the market of slaves

and drown them in the black blood of dreams.

To evaporate into a cloud raining children who

are not aging.

Mohsen Elbelasy