Text: Attention, the Blind

The Saudi poet: Hussein Al-Dahim wanders the alleys of time, through squares adorned with beggars, dervishes, wet nurses, and lottery ticket vendors. You live in vain, spending your nights gnawing on the long-standing injustice between your teeth on days you feel are cursed. The years you squandered in sin have left you nothing but a headache when it strikes, and the loosening of your garments as you spend the night interpreting dreams and what lies between them. You continued to crack under the girls’ hatred of you and the rejection of your stalled poems. The eye that repeatedly became inflamed, which you bandaged with your cloak, you would blow into and wipe with the sin hanging around your neck. War’s baggage spills from its skirts, migrations emerge, but the bellies remain empty, awaiting a desecrated blade to pierce them and move on. In the decline of your days toward their nadir, you may pat the back of madness, pinch its ear, and set it free, floating like a lord, your breaths drifting toward strongholds you never knew, so that the names of your blood may seek refuge in you, and another madness may implore you, before you rest on the slope of time, which you see descending from beneath your feet, awaiting the girls who neither care for you nor for your years, as they proceed toward the estuary. Your river is calm, your sea turbulent, and the alleys in which you scattered your cells have narrowed your broad vision. To you, there is no difference between wheat and chaff; both choke the throats and are savored by the hand of the boatman as he reads the inscriptions of the blue tents. Yet your tent has not guided the seekers to its secrets, nor to the white doves of Gorgan, whose body you planted with the feathers of signatures whenever the blind man turned toward them, their reasons having turned against him. The black reward scratches the knife of your shoe as you indulge in nudging a corner of the Tawafers who stripped the skin from your head. The fifties stand tall and circle around your deeds until you find the walls whose towers’ lamps do not light except when the ascendants climb the fortresses’ stairs to assassinate the spacious nests.