dawn cracks with the call to prayer when pink streaks strike and roll across the sky like gunsmoke, i'll spend twenty minutes on a patterned prayer mat and i'll think on lost days that were taken down the bend of the past. it's time to rise now and cover my face because dust hurts my eyes and i like tattoos that are made from desert plants and inscribe me with poetry and verses of Quran. i'm different but the same.
brave new worlds give me time to tweak neon lights and crunch glass underfoot at the end of a fistfight. i can don my wounds and snap my broken limbs but i revel in scars, haven't i said that before? my hair is curly and my skin is perfectly normal because nothing is perfect and i paint the courtyard of my house with the blood of my enemies.
i read the gates of the skies and i learn secrets, i stalked the kingdom of the djinn with their smokeless fire and their ancient tongue, let's sit down and speak arabic together. we can cause the mountains to collapse and divide the empire between us.
but i have goosebumps now, the air has living beasts in it running through my soul like fire coating the mountainsides and killing everything in its path. the soothsayers crowd around me wanting to know secrets like snakes spitting venom they spit questions at me and i recoil at the stench of corruption.
i'm an arabist so you should take a shot of my words, look in my eye and see me smiling. i look like a devil but you insist on trying to know me deeply. my surface is like obsidian and i don't do this with preparation, it's just my mind spewing machinations and incantations.
