I Love You Not (I)
I love you not for all of your cunning ways—for your misleading façade of serenity and tolerance,
a mille-feuille of secrets, ghosts, and conflict,
a world of your own, carved out by men with AK-47’s that once played the piano, and sang along to love songs,
a broken constellation of smoke, old war dust, and music,
a cosmopolitan stun grenade of so much life, and so much vogue, and even more life.
Today in Ashrafieh
Today in Ashrafieh, our neighbor Mrs. Karam gave her son an ultimatum: her, or his fiancé.
His own flesh and blood, or the secret queer love of his unexciting life.
Her: a living legacy from the civil war, a personified raging wound of the violent secular division of
70’s and 80’s Beirut. A girl whose womanhood came too early. An illiberal whose freedom was
robbed from under the bombs. A mother.
His fiancé: a middle school math teacher, millennial, who loves passionately, differently, and
unacceptably.
I Love You Not (II)
I am so good at disowning you,
I am so good at wishing you were something you are not and will never be.
I love you not with the relief I feel every time the airplane takes off,
and with the harmonious stench of trash, old sweat, and coffee grounds that I come back to.
With the nausea I get whenever I think of never breathing you in again,
with the way I love you and forgive you, in the most destructive manner.
Wonderful work!
ReplyDeleteThis reads like a brilliant prose poem. I love this line: a world of your own, carved out by men with AK-47’s that once played the piano, and sang along to love songs,
ReplyDeleteThe whole thing is excellent - well done.
Wonderful writing, love the juxtaposition between war and peace, the old and the new.
ReplyDeleteWow, is this stunning.
ReplyDelete