SCENES FROM JIDDAH

the deep dark daguerreotype
tatterdemalions will be
sleek angels

they approach cars stopped
at a traffic light
wandering nigras swathed in
black nylon abayas
carrying bundled cardboard
scavenged from dumpsters
in a baby stroller
at the corner of a walled residence
in Jeddah
they've come on a Haj visa
and overstayed it
they came from Nigeria or Niger
(they wear those same bright pagnes in Cote d'Ivoire)
Nelson Mandella freed them
for this, the plutonomy
planet-wide, kabalization of money

"[...] modern science [...] has excluded things that,
by its own pseudo-standards, have as much right to come in as have
the chosen"

the detritus is neatly arranged
in piles blown by a breeze
emulating a ready-made
the frame it dwells in

O, do not change it by sweeping
it away and putting it in a bin
Hindi musulman in blue dungarees

let it go to another ready-made
framed space in another small
universe of particulate matter
to gather in a particular quoin

estoy un axolotle hoy

"[...] [the] good in our experience is continuous with,
or is only another aspect of evil"

"[...] demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all
mythological characters"

a plate of oily fries gleaming
in the neon light placed
at the feet of tatterdemalions
at the entrance of a 24-hour
supermarket, while cars
swoosh by on the macadam

Indians stare at me with
taciturn faces in the aisles

"Like purgatory," I think.

"'existence', is a flow, or a current,
or an attempt [at what--as in radio-amino assay?]
from negativeness to positiveness,
and is intermediate to both"

the pre-dawn call-to-prayer
is like aerolites hurled at me

"Arya crackin'?" Or,
"Does that crack you up?"

A Micky Dee's beef sausage!

I wound up here
where I'm wound up
like a top or wind-up toy

unstuck in time like Billy Pilgrim

I'm an old cowhand
from the Rio Grand
wipe my ass with my hand
like a musulman

guano riddled cars
abandoned alongside the road

"What shade of black African
polluted by devil whiteman are you?"

Shuffling old black harris
greets me with good morning

"Space is an anesthetic...miles of space
numb you, put memory asleep"

"I'm going to lay a vine under
the Jew's balls for a dime"

"I don't want to die a virgin,
I want to come and die"

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
I simply remember

White Russians, West Africans
as black as jet, Chinese
with skin translucent as pearls,
whores for the taking in Al Ain

(Heil) Fayha 4
Abdullah Sulaiman St.
Al Hamood mosque

MK
started 4 Dec. 2013 in Jeddah

'Isameek abu mean?'

"Fee ha" district 4
opposite KFC
Abdullah Suleiman St.
Dar al Hikmah (ladies' college)

Toyota co.
big mosque

'kubree' - flyover
'balud' - old town
difference btwn. 'jamaع' (mosque) and 'jamaعah' (university) is feminine so you have to pronounce the 'ta'marbuta'

Dec. 5, Thurs.
at the Al-Ryan International Polyclinic:
Mook the Spook speaks English with a painstakingly limited range of vocabulary that astonishes in its complexity. As I told L, one has to take a posture of not getting rattled. He sagely advised one should not take things mysteriously, as if they needed the whys answered. D was a character [I never met him] that fit this American profile of the sophisticated pragmatist. He could not take the mysteries apparently. The apparition of the Virgin Mary was apparently not in his book. Mook frequently talks of D in a tone of affable respect. He was the one, I believe, who came from LA and, according to Mook, took cocaine and alcohol, so Mook suggested he somehow fake the blood test/results, what he meant I do not recall. What he suggested was whether I had any addiction I suppose.

"Erecting a fence can prevent terrorist infiltration, but it can't stop the flow of feces." -- Saudi Gazette, Wed. Dec. 4, 2013

Perhaps, that spare animal of darkness slipped into D's mind.
"It must have missed my Irish eyes," said J.

Dec. 5, 2013
Arrived day before yesterday in Jeddah. Plane touched down at around 3:45 local time. I didn't get through immigration until about 5:30 p.m. There was no driver from the university awaiting my arrival. A makeshift situation from which Saeed, the driver of a private limousine service, emerged, a small man dressed in white thobe and a smoker of cigarettes. I paid him 400 riyals for his service, including his helping me buy a phone and taking me to the hotel. L said it was an exorbitant price, the taxi ride to the hotel should have been 200. I write with the qalam (pen, pronounced 'golem') of the Trident Hotel. The following is the words I recorded at the San Diego airport and on the American Airlines flight to JFK in my brother's copy of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5:
Dec. 2, '13 SD airport

placid looks of satisfaction
like under anesthesia with a smile
just after the announcement about
unattended baggage an airport cop did appear,
strolled by me, chest puffed out, and gave m--I was
called to the gate and asked if I would like to change
my seat to a window rather than the middle one I had--I refused, preferring an aisle seat. No dice.
He gave me a curt nod.
All is for the convenience of others, never the cipher the Other--why should I give up my seat for a couple that wasn't seated together in the first place? I can't even be
with my wife!

Starbucks has infiltrated the deep bowels of the terminal--one right over my left shoulder, and Gate 31 is a few yards away.

Why would a stranger approach me to carry an object?

What sort of object? A box cutter?

I was going to say something about the couple that
met by chance and exchanged pleasantries about
Thanksgiv["Have a good day, and good luck on your boots"]ing, then sat with an empty chair btwn. them, now looking quite calm as cows, but not before they chatted
while playing their finger or thumb on the face of their
phones, as if they were comfortably knitting.

I tipped the skycap at curbside 5 bucks for
checking me in. The better way to go (don't go, Al Rasheed!
don't go to the gate to check in. It's a ruse!) rather than an
officious ticket counter person.

I want to begin to transcribe my journal entries before I leave this place on vacation and hopefully it will be for good. I arrived December 3, 2013 from JFK and I only had a feeling of foreboding even dread of coming here, but I have made it through, and there is almost a week and a half before my departure June 25. An experience of sensory deprivation is the only way I can describe how this experience has been for me. It is very hard for a person who has never been in this part of the world to understand. The desert is a place that has to be transcended in order for it to be tolerated. You have to submit yourself to the heat, if anything. Mark Twain said that God is discovered in a place like this because there is absolutely nothing redeeming about the desert and you have to look up to escape the oppression. One of the friends I made here referred to it as an "open-air prison." In the end the smallest infraction committed against his way of doing things was an irritant that became a straw that broke the camel's back.