KM4

1/ THE MOUTH Not English Somali Italian French the mouth blown open in the Toyota battle wagon at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Not the Absolute Speaker of the News, not crisis chatter's famine/flame, the mouth blown open at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Speaks back to the dead at KM4, old men in macawis, beards dyed with henna, the women wearing blue jeans under black chadors. Nothing solved or resolved, exactly as they were, the old wars still flickering in the auras round their faces, the mouth of smoke at KM4 mouths syllables of smoke never heard before. 2/ THE CONCERT Lake water in smooth still sun moves in and out of synch with the violin playing at the villa— the bow attacking the strings looks like a hand making some frantic motion to come closer, go away— it's hard to say what's being said, who's being summoned from the dead, from red sand drifting across the sheen of the shining floor. The pianist's hands taking wing to hover above a chord become the flight path of a marabou stork crashing down on carrion, the piano levitating up and up above red sand that it starts to float across the way a camel's humps far off in the mirage rise and fall fall and rise until mirage overbrims itself and everything into its shimmering disappears. And the ones who died the day before, blown up at the crossroads at KM4, scanning the notice board for scholarship results, put their fingers to their names as the onlookers applaud. 3/ ORACLE The little man carved out of bone shouts something to the world the world can't hear. All around him the roads, lost in drifted, deep red sand, die out in sun just clearing the plain. Dried out, faded, he makes an invocation at an altar: an AK-47 stood up on its butt end in a pile of rock. The AK talks the talk of what guns talk— not rage or death or clichés of killing, but specs of what it means to be fired off in the air. No fear when it jams, no enemy running away, no feeling like a river overflowing in a cloudburst— forget all that: the little man of bone is not the streaming head of the rivergod roaring at Achilles; nor dead Patroclos complaining in a dream how Achilles has forgotten him. The AK wants to tell a different truth— a truth ungarbled that is so obvious no one could possibly mistake its meaning. If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrel what you'll see is a boy with trousers rolled above his ankles. You'll see a mouth of bone moving in syllables that have the rapid-fire clarity of a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute. 4/ "BEFORE HE BLEW HIMSELF UP, HE LIKED TO PLAY AT GAMES WITH OTHER YOUTHS." And there, among the dead, appearing beside your tent flap, at your elbow in the mess hall, waiting to use, or just leaving, the showers and latrine, the boy with his trousers rolled appears like an afterimage burned into an antique computer screen, haunting whatever the cursor tries to track. So he liked to play at games with other youths? The English has the slightly too-formal sound of someone being poured through the sieve of another language. Syllable after syllable piling up and up until the boy, buried to the neck, slowly vanishes into overtones that are and are not his. As if he were a solid melting to liquid turning to gas feeding a flame. 5/ TIME TO FORGET There's a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand. Over there's a water tower, under that's the bore hole and here the body asks and asks about the role it's asked to play: no matter how it's dressed. Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena who eats even the bones and shits bone-white scat from the calcium. No matter if it sleeps under a dome of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun, or hides in a spider hole or walks around in uniform behind plate glass, the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown. On the television the blade runner is facing down the skinjob, and of the two, who is the more human? On the table there isn't a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey that keeps whispering,It's OK to be this way, nobody will know. And then the boy who rolls his pantlegs up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton. 6/ THE COMING At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air and hangs there beautiful and repulsive. Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds don't stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound— the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out as you go round and round the roundabout at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the Casspir are all pretending to be dead. The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses, Hey, can't you get my flak jacket adjusted so it doesn't crush my collar?