Читать книгу Divide and Rule - Walid Bitar - Страница 7

Publically, you claim you’re an ocean

I am surviving in as marine life,

without provoking a rival’s claque,

its main body on a beach frying,

predictable before the sun descends

to an underworld we’re above at war.

I’d rather fight the living. The dead

have had too much time to mull things over,

argue their questions precede statements

I issue, turning my words into answers,

though I speak first – there’s no respect

for simple chronology from the bastards,

their testes crated, and ours in states

required by the counter-revolution,

our ex-employer preaching from the choir,

singing never his primary strength,

glorious, though, compared to splashes

through swamps whose sprites mistook us for ephemera

they’d carelessly created with snaps

of fingers they later realized we’d fractured,

divine punishment a lower sound barrier,

our speech’s value incalculable

as oxygen’s, because regular users

are sometimes the rich, sometimes the poor,

these beasts of burden driving me wild

till I’m so comfortable in my skin

I fall back on memories I shouldn’t trust,

and don’t expect they’ll break my fall.