Osama Bin Laden

Your name is baby’s breath pushed through molten lead.
like dark love or soft death, your almond eyes
cut a door down my cellar steps.

I crawl inside your blood urge like a sex drive,
wrap up in your dirty robes and inhale
ancient and serene ways to misbehave.

Help me my Osama,
I’m so lost in these seas of static,
the black and the white trick each other,

Erasing in the waves of grey.
Statues and illusions trade faces
with time and place.

I look for you at the end of the bourgeois and american dreams;
my hands search to clasp your hands
at the end of everything.

I look for you on a wind swept plain
where my vanity and love can grapple your hate unafraid,
like two lions face to face,

 

Silent in the yellow air of your lost desert wind.
So murderous, so monotheistic you are,
all claws and veins, your matted Islamic mane

One surah removed from the scimitar and Pillar of Fire
So lost, so lost you are
You creep through life like a drop of blood

Sliding down a knife,
a race of nails, a river on fire,
the runaway who never arrives.

I am there my bin Laden,
I am here
I am the insect tracing the razor’s edge

From the taste of your breath to your innermost ear –
what’s there?
What’s there?

What child,
cycling through sultanic gardens,
tripped over white laces,

All aspirations of virtue divided,
leapt out of the lap of luxury into undiscovered countries.
A father’s affection spread too thin,

Your dream, your private religion, your river divided,
a fish eaten before it’s cleaned,
chewing on the scales and the teeth.

Eat,
Osama,
Eat.

All honor and a limitless absence of love;
you forgot the man who fell in the village water well.
You forgot your mother watched your first baby breath.

How do you love your wives Osama?
With a measured and responsive thrust?
Or do you rush to reap your seed?

I suspect your interest lies in the ends and not the means.
Yet you never slouched at the blinking screen, like me,
never tinkered with life under green lights

With the bureaucrats dropping bombs from desks and closets closed
like the next door child
masturbating and afraid behind the parted blinds.

I prefer the ascetic calm of your rifle grip,
so much like the clasped palms of prayer
or a selfless set of lips going down.

So much like a prayer a god makes to a man
as he spills the volcano’s burning disease
over gentle fields of cream and sugar cane.

Skull of the lion,
the paw carved in sand like a wet tongue frozen.
I hear your laugher’s echo in the canyon

as slaves bring us weapons and verses scripted in stolen gold
as your secret message hissed and struck its venom
as your yellow fingernail scratched the sky.

Osama, you would strangle me with your own finger bones-
even as I’d die fighting back,
I’ll always love some part of you,

for that.