Thursday, July 1, 2021

Excerpt from THE WOLVES OF THE MOON, Ghadah Kamal & Mohsen Elbelasy





The Poem is Dead

He was going on like a lost shadow.
He wears a red coat in the time of the murderous bulls.

As a skinny frog,
He sleeps in the debris of himself.
He eats a fresh death.

He jumps over desperate burning rocks.

The god poet died Leaving many old humans behind,
the heavy dust asking: What will you find 
behind the last fort of that hidden in the crystal?

The poem is dead in a slaver’s bed.
The poem died in a slaver’s bed.

And you…you are a jungle of old desires.

What?

How about a scene that hunted the butterflies of the impossible?

O dust, be a guitar
…So it is

Be a man wearing a coat of pianos that’s playing a symphony
of falling debris and thirst.
Dance, dust, and spit out all the plague that 
inhabits ant heads in the squares.

On the Sonnet of the broken roads…
dance and be a burning smack that breaks the
monotony of the dying shadows.

The nigh passes.

And the butterflies of the dream explode like a death…
Line-in-line, extended colors in the oysters of fading.
And the blood of the sheep woven with handcuffs
that are hanging over your head,
it forms an eternal wreath of gum

Dear poet…
You are a tomb saturated with the penultimate smoke of death…
The bells of Negation strike your broken neck.
Your chest graves sing the rush hour…
You are nailed to the wall of spiders with looters hats…
Fluttering over thorns of waiting…

Red like water
Blue like fire
Black like air.

O painter

Many locusts come and fly over your color palette…
Locusts and more locusts
Bleeding and more bleeding

O painter

Do not make from the Drawing board what the
butcher does when he decapitates the utopian lambs…
Make your painting a delirous microscope that
does not lie in the gypsum logic shrouds…

Draw crumpled handcuffs and a bottle of wine
bearing the reddening of the crowd of screams…

O musician…

I do not want to hear anything that brings me to death…

O musician

Play something like a tight fist with faces that don’t kneel
And from the noise draw a hammer
Little by little write letters that do not fly from the chimneys…

O vague, burning mind

Explode
Or you died in silence, mixed with pallor
Mixed with fear…

O hand that is filled with volcanic eyes…

Slap me on my unhappy face, break it so that it won’t fall
into the tissues of spiders and the upper hanger of the pigs…
Until Obsessive dies and is replaced by a new void…
Here on this dirty, bloody street…

The poet wolf was killed
With mixed tears in his black blood, stretched 
And the night flowing from his mouth on the
sidewalks of expatriation.

Your street where all the keys are lost, burdened with locks,
you will die like the god poet and like the poem.




The Store of the Damaged Brains

I will open a store that sells damaged brains.

My goods will not be expensive.

I will help idiots to look more stupid in the shadows.
The store name will be: “The Phantom of the Opera”.
Shelves contain brains at reasonable prices.
Human brains, monkeys, frogs, and crows.
It will be available to humas from now on,
to change their brains here in my store while dancing on;
(The Phantom of the Opera) music.

A young man was betrayed by his girlfriend, so he 
decided to replace his brain with a fish’s brain,
and in the village he became called, “the fish man”.

Another woman lost her son in the war, and she 
replaced her brain with the brain of a woman with psychosis.

and many stories…

One day a woman came without breasts and 
wanted to replace her brain with a tree,
they say in the village that she lost her baby in an 
air strike and cut her breasts, and
when we told her that we were not replacing
brains with trees.

She removed her severed breasts from between
her thighs, and shot everyone in the store.

The Brain Massacre was on music:
(The Phantom of the Opera)

The sky is raining frogs what a curse!

Only the hesitation of a woman raving at the 
beginning of the road.

The funeral of a soldier who returned from the
war without arms, and his mother made a wooden
body for him, as if it was a funeral for Pinocchio.
The sounds of war illuminate the boozers night.

The lights of the aircraft illuminate the bedroom 
of the prostitutes.

The air is saturated with death.

A woman without breasts, and
no heads looking for the trunk of the tree.

Neither head sings loudly:

I feel the shade is more honest
under the shadows our hidden features appear,
there in the shade we all look like each other.

Dogs are dogs
Humans are human beings
Monkeys become monkeys.

Do you think that is why those stuffed inside
expensive clothes are afraid to walk in
the shadows?

I knew a woman who loved to draw shadows
She changed her eyes every day

There is a store on the edge of town
It sells used eyes at discount prices.

And one day, she decided to sell her tongue and
buy a new nose.
She stood in front of her shadow,
and she pulled her tongue out,
and she cut it while she was laughing.

Then she remembered that’s he wanted to sell her
breasts and replace them with two gears.

She looked at her severed tongue and cried.

The closed rooms are full of spiders.

The ceilings are spiders’ homes.

How happy!

I imagine how happy I was when I was hanging
from my feet in the ceiling of the room.

I watched everything silently and I made a guitar
to turn it into a spider’s web to attract all
those I dislike to it, and melt them with acid in the
shades of the room.

I am not a spider but I love the wooden frog, and I 
love
its collective croak…
Like a symphony walking at the shadows of the night.

Oh if I were a wolf…
I love wolves that live only in the shadows.
Dance
Howls
in the shade

Then she walks around herself in an acrobatic dance.

She kills herself by the trunk of the tree,
wailing,

Falling frogs, a soldier without limbs,
a woman with delirium
a store for body parts
Boom
Bomb’s sound
screaming

(Translated by Mohsen Elbelasy)




The Symphony of the Curly Eyes

Curly eyes
Wingless butterflies
A single artery crucified on the wall.

Boxes of Sulfur without ceiling

Black bags at the clinic’s door
The clinic packed with hanged fetuses

The smell of blood smells from Butcher’s shops.

The voices of the birds are begging on the edge of the altar,
the Crows are waiting for massacre

Children cuffed in uniform on the edge of the
sidewalk waiting
Drunks go back to their holes.

A woman spreads her underwear and bedding,
To mesmerize the world
with what her beauties did with her Bull at night.

Banner of the doctor who injects Botox inside
hearts.

Billboards about Beauty, and 
Billboards about new compounds,
Lame old bus.

At the edge of the end of the road,
there is a woman who embraces two children,
and there is a Music coming from some home,

and the trumpets of cars.

Then she embraces her babies And jumps in the 
river.

Again

The girl smiles at the entrance of the clinic
Welcome to our liposuction clinic.
Voice in front of black bags.

Boy, carry these stinky bags.

The birds at the edge of the altar are crying,
and the crows are screaming,

Then a woman floats over the Nile.

(Translated by Mohsen Elbelasy)




To order copies of THE WOLVES OF THE MOON by Ghadah Kamal & Mohsen Elbelasy, via Lulu, click here.

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